Animals and Agency (Human-Animal Studies)

Animals and Agency

Human-Animal Studies Editor

Kenneth Shapiro Animals & Society Institute Editorial Board

Ralph Acampora Hofstra University

Clifton Flynn University of South Carolina

Hilda Kean Ruskin College, Oxford

Randy Malamud Georgia State University

Gail Melson Purdue University

VOLUME 8

Animals and Agency An Interdisciplinary Exploration

Edited by

Sarah E. McFarland Ryan Hediger

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009

Cover design: Wim Goedhart This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Animals and agency : an interdisciplinary exploration / edited by Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger. p. cm. — (Human-animal studies, ISSN 1573-4226 ; v. 8) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-17580-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Animal welfare. I. McFarland, Sarah E. II. Hediger, Ryan. III. Title. IV. Series. HV4708.A57 2009 179’.3—dc22 2009014841

ISSN 1573-4226 ISBN 978 90 04 17580 8 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................

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Approaching the Agency of Other Animals: An Introduction .... Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger

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SECTION I

ANIMALS AS AGENTS Whale Agency: Affordances and Acts of Resistance in Captive Environments ..................................................................................... Traci Warkentin

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The Racehorse as Protagonist: Agency, Independence, and Improvisation ...................................................................................... Shelly R. Scott

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Consuming Timothy Treadwell: Redefining Nonhuman Agency in Light of Herzog’s Grizzly Man ....................................... David Lulka

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Dancing Penguins and a Pretentious Raccoon: Animated Animals and 21st Century Environmentalism ............................... Sarah E. McFarland

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SECTION II

SPEAKING THROUGH ANIMALS No Human Hand? The Ourang-Outang in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” ............................................................................ Stephanie Rowe

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Sled Dogs of the American North: On Masculinity, Whiteness, and Human Freedom ......................................................................... Rebecca Onion

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The Slave Whisperer Rides the Frontier: Horseface Minstrelsy in the Western ..................................................................................... J. J. Clark

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SECTION III

SPEAKING FOR ANIMALS Representing the Experimental Animal: Competing Voices in Victorian Culture ............................................................................... Jed Mayer

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Forms of Life: The Search for the Simian Self in Ape Language Experiments ........................................................................................ Rebecca Bishop

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Animals, Agency, and Absence: A Discourse Analysis of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee Meetings ............ Debra Durham and Debra Merskin

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SECTION IV

HUMANIMALS AND OTHER MARGINAL SPECIES “To Abandon the Colonial Animal”: “Race,” Animals, and the Feral Child in Kipling’s Mowgli Stories ........................................... Dipika Nath At the Top of the Hierarchical Ladder: Were-Animals in Annette Curtis Klause’s Blood and Chocolate and Patrice Kindl’s Owl in Love .......................................................................................... Cat Yampell The Microgeography of Infestation in Relationship Spaces ......... Matthew Candelaria Crossing Over: (Dis)Ability, Contingent Agency, and Death in the Marginal Genre Work of Temple Grandin and Jim Harrison ....................................................................................... Ryan Hediger

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ENVOI Towards a Philosophy of the Polyp .................................................. Laurence Simmons

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List of Contributors ............................................................................ Index ....................................................................................................

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A collection of essays is only as strong as the chapters that comprise it, and we are above all grateful that our contributors are not only on the cutting edge of human-animal studies but are such wonderful writers as well. Thank you! We are also indebted to the Department of Language and Communication at Northwestern State University for providing us with research assistants: Roxie J. James, whose skilled eyes and able pen helped make this manuscript virtually error-free before it even landed on an editor’s desk, and Amanda LaRoche, who helped prevent innumerable snafus during the final stages of publication. The collection was further improved in response to the careful and constructive comments of its anonymous reviewers, who we thank for their supportive and valuable advice; likewise we thank the editors for guiding this book through the publication process. Our students at the University of Colorado and at Northwestern State University contributed ideas and enthusiasm in our classes. Finally, the incredible popularity of our conference panels focusing on the intersections of animality and agency made us realize just how desperate is the need for this kind of interdisciplinary collaboration; for that, we thank our colleagues in the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and the Western Literature Association.

APPROACHING THE AGENCY OF OTHER ANIMALS: AN INTRODUCTION Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger When Tatiana escaped her zoo enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo on December 25th, 2007, and killed a man who may have been taunting her, the media rushed to ask why. Why would a 300-pound Siberian tiger escape her small yard and attack three men, one fatally? A year earlier Tatiana had bitten the arm of someone feeding her, but those actions were considered the behavior of “a normal tiger.”1 But killing a man and injuring two others is not. But why not? When it comes to nonhuman animals, many humans are more comfortable assuming that other species will act in ways that are predictable and mechanistic—that Tatiana will tolerate her life in an enclosed zoo exhibit as long as she is fed. That she will not try to escape. That she would not hurt humans because her basic needs are met and she is “just” a tiger: food, water, sex. As human animals, we know that meeting basic needs is not enough. Indeed, we often advocate for essential rights of activity that include the expression of agency: the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in one key formulation. Many have contended that other animals deserve no such opportunities because they lack the abilities, particularly the cognitive abilities, to make use of them.2 However, recent scientific studies argue that some other species do have higherlevel cognitive functions similar to those of humans. For instance, Alex the parrot and his human companion, Irene Pepperberg, proved convincingly that interspecies communication using verbal language is possible and that it reveals that even an animal with a brain the size

1 Zoo director Manuel Mollinedo, quoted in “Wall Enclosing Killer Tiger 4 Feet Below Industry Standard,” CNN online, December 28, 2007, http://www.cnn.com/2007/ US/12/27/tiger.attack/index.html. 2 These debates about animal rights are important, but since they have been treated extensively by others, we focus less on them here. Instead, we are presenting ways in which we can understand animals to exert agency, in hopes that such material can further enrich the animal rights debate as well as other debates.

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of a pecan can think and use higher-level cognitive abilities.3 Similarly, canine behavioral studies reveal that dogs can understand that a symbol represents a real thing and that the sounds humans make when talking can represent items in the world. For example, border collie Rico can identify more than 200 objects by name. Even more interesting, however, is that he is also capable of a form of reasoning called fast-mapping, which enables him to infer that an unfamiliar word corresponds to a new object. Furthermore, he can still remember the new word and its corresponding object after being denied access to it for a month.4 This and comparable studies of animal cognition reveal that humans are not as different from other animals as we have historically thought—even animals with whom we share very few physical similarities.5 Many animals, it appears, may have the intellectual capability and self-awareness necessary to be considered agents in their own lives. Tatiana, for instance, may have mindfully decided to leap over her enclosure wall that December evening. She may have acted with awareness. But are intellectual capability and self-awareness the keys to agency? How do we define animal agency? In his 1986 book, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, Paul W. Taylor offers an inclusive view when he says that “all organisms are teleological centers of life in the sense that each is a unique individual pursuing its own good in its own way.”6 Similarly, Eileen Crist in Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind notes that Darwin considered animals to be actors: “Simple ideas—like a bird weaving for pleasure or singing for its own amusement—embody assumptions and consequences that are far from simple, namely, that animals’ actions are experientially

3 As contrasted, of course, with the use of sign-language to communicate with the great apes. Many people assume because there is greater similarity with ape species and humans that higher-level cognitive abilities like memory and anticipation, imitation, creativity, and self-awareness would logically be shared with other primates but not with species we evolutionarily diverged with millions of years ago, like birds or dogs. 4 Juliane Kaminski, Josep Call, and Julia Fischer. “Word Learning in a Domestic Dog: Evidence for ‘Fast Mapping,’ ” Science 304, no. 5677 (June 11, 2004), 1682–83. 5 Charles Darwin decided that even earthworms have greater cognitive function than expected of an invertebrate because they needed to be able to distinguish between and identify the kinds of material they use in their tunnels. See his The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits (1881). 6 Qtd in Gary Steiner, Anthropocentrism and its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2005), 205.

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meaningful and actively authored.”7 This chapter, working to outline a theory of agency, moves among a number of closely related terms—free will, ability, rationality, mind, morality, subjectivity—and we could add to this list in an indefinitely long fashion. These words form a cluster around issues that are difficult to separate; we have decided to privilege the notion of “agency” for this text because it cuts to the center of our concerns. It highlights how animals live in the world. But postulating animal agency is not a new idea. Darwin’s writings, though famous for seeming to undermine even human agency by presenting evolution on a large scale, “systematically foster the witnessing of subjectivity in animal life by representing action as performed by, rather than happening to, animals.”8 In fact, many of the most prominent advocates for a new understanding of animals trace their views back to Darwin.9 Darwin’s theory of evolution is thus still one of the most influential premises upon which the continuum between humans and other animals is founded. In The Descent of Man, Darwin argues that The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the sense and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, &c., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.10

Working out exactly what degree or kind of difference lies between human and nonhuman animal agency is part of the task at hand, although we are also interested in refining our ideas about human agency. There are at least two reasons for examining animal agency this way. The first is that the natural human tendency is to view an animal’s actions in terms of our own conscious motives (called anthropomorphism). The second is because our own conscious motives may not be as conscious as we like to think (and thus may be even more similar to

7 Eileen Crist, Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 40. 8 Eileen Crist, Images of Animals, 40. 9 See for example Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 13–17 and passim; Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why They Matter (Novato, California: New World Library, 2007), 31–34 and passim. 10 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Revised Edition (Chicago: Conkey Co Publishers, 1874).

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other animals’ behaviors than we traditionally consider them to be). To put it another way, there are two major forces of thinking about humans and other animals: one emphasizes the continuity between us and them and has Darwin as its familiar champion. The other emphasizes the discontinuities between humans and other animals, constructing a binary opposition between us and all other species, and has traditional western monotheistic religion and much of the western philosophical tradition as its strongest supports. Questions of animal agency necessarily involve many issues about the lives of animals and humans. For instance, there is much contention in scientific and philosophical circles about group selection as a part of evolution (which impinges on notions of agency) and about the possibility of animal morality. Frans de Waal, in Primates and Philosophers, connects human morality to emotional behaviors and feelings in animals. He claims that there is “continuity between human social instincts and those of our closest relatives, the monkeys and apes,” writing “I feel we are standing at the threshold of a much larger shift in theorizing that will end up positioning morality firmly within the emotional core of human nature.”11 For de Waal, animals have varying degrees of the emotions that add up to morality in humans, but human morality—“disinterested concern for others and for society as a whole”12—is unique to our species. Marc Bekoff, however, goes further: “I believe we can make the stronger claim that some animals might be moral beings.”13 Again these claims connect back to Darwin’s argument that emotions are the root evolutionary cause of morality. Emotions evolved via natural selection and are not unique to human animals. Behaviors, expressions, gestures, and vocalizations reflect similar emotional responses across species lines, which is part of why we can know how a canine companion responds to a squirrel (excite-

11 Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 57. De Waal explicitly positions his view against the notion of humans as nasty at base that prevails in social contract theory, much like Nussbaum (de Waal 3–7). He also discusses “group selection” (14–16), animal altruism (85–88), and many other key issues in animal debates. 12 De Waal, Primates and Philosophers, 55. 13 Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals (California: New World Library, 2007), 86. Bekoff clarifies his position, indicating, “I’m arguing that some animals have moral codes of behavior, but not that animals have ethics,” by which he means “contemplating ‘why good is good’ ” (88).

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ment) or fireworks (fear).14 As social animals, humans have evolved with the desire to maintain relationships with their relatives and others and that desire reveals itself in a kind of compassion that engenders moral behavior. Moral agency for humans is wrapped up in notions of “free will”: that each human being is the ultimate source or origin of her choices and behaviors. Philosophers have long debated free will and its consequences and we do not expect to have the final answers here, but suffice it to say that the concepts of agent causation and free will are significant to issues of nonhuman animal agency. This is largely because it is difficult to think of ourselves as having the ability to initiate action while simultaneously believing that the human mind is physical, created by the expressions of the brain. Even nonreligious people are still strongly influenced by the Cartesian notion of mind: that each person has an intangible, disembodied mind that interacts with the brain and the rest of the body, receiving information from the body about its state and giving orders to the body to act in certain ways. We routinely think of ourselves functioning within the influences of things like our genes, family environments, cultural backgrounds, education, and the options before each of us, but then we imagine that we take all of those influences, use our free will to decide a course of action, and thus choose our behavior. In this view, our bodies are physical objects and thus subject to the laws of physics, but our “minds” are not, even though they interact with the physical. Descartes argued that the soul cannot be explained in terms of the physical body, although the nonphysical can affect the body through the exercise of free will. Thus, human agency is enacted by a nonphysical substance distinct from ordinary matter (what Gilbert Ryle mocked as “the ghost in the machine”).15 Human agency, in the Cartesian formulation, is not influenced by any set of external or internal causes or behaviors. I choose to act in one way rather than another because I want to. This line of thinking typically lends itself to the question of whether or not nonhuman animals have something that can be called a “mind” or “soul”—the nonphysical source of free will and agency in this Cartesian line of reasoning. However, we should recognize instead that the

14 This is called homology in evolutionary biology: the study of similarities across species caused by a shared evolutionary history. 15 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).

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belief in a controlling disembodied mind is flawed in the first place. As Owen Flanagan lucidly states, the “mind” is created in the central nervous system: The mind/brain does its magic through the operation of neurons, with axons and dendrites that form synaptic connections, and via electrical and chemical processes that mediate attention, remembering, learning, seeing, smelling, walking, talking, love, affection, benevolence, and gratitude. [. . . .] The brain working in concert with the rest of the nervous system is our res cogitans—our thinking stuff. We are fully embodied creatures.16

In other words, the mind is a phenomenon created out of an organization of things in the physical brain. And if the mind is another physical aspect, as cognitive scientists claim, then the continuum between human and nonhuman animals also suggests that other animals might have similar physical facilities. Euan MacPhail’s contentious conclusion that there are no qualitative or quantitative differences in general intelligence between vertebrate species is a further indication that perhaps the distinctions between humans and other animals are too severely marked in our thinking about species.17 Some might say that animals cannot have agency unless they are also moral beings with consciousness that includes a self-reflective, Cartesian-like soul or mind. However, we can say that beings who act in ways that conform to the behavioral standards of their groups—whether that be a human community or culture or a group of animals—act in moral ways. In fact, interspecies morality is something we experience daily. We are most familiar, perhaps, with our own notions of how to ethically interact with other species, whether face-to-face or abstractly, when we decide what to put on our tables and in our stomachs. There are also tales of heroic animals like Binti, the western lowland gorilla who assisted an unconscious human child after he fell into her enclosure at a zoo in Illinois, cradling him and perhaps protecting him from the other gorillas. Although people have suggested that Binti was only doing what she was trained to do with a doll, it is reasonable to at least say that an animal who acts in accordance with unspoken assumptions

16 Flanagan, Owen. The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 6. 17 Euan MacPhail further suggests that all studies of comparative intelligence should begin with the assumption that there is “no difference” (his “null hypothesis”). See MacPhail, The Evolution of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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about what each of us will do is acting morally.18 If Binti had attacked the boy, her behavior would be labeled something like maternal protective instinct, as she carried her own daughter on her back at the time. Nonetheless, behavior that conforms to the expectations of a group is ethical behavior within that group, suggesting that nonhuman animals can be said to have some kind of morality. Sarah can share another example of interspecies relationship and morality: her home is occupied by two canine companions and an elderly feline as well as a few animals of the human variety. The 15-year-old cat, Trouble, has complete control over all sleeping and play arrangements and has different rules of interaction with October, the 10-year-old dog and Caxton, the 2-year-old pup, and vice versa. October will not allow Caxton onto his bed but willingly shares with Trouble. Trouble will not play with October but has an elaborate routine of play with Caxton—as long as Caxton follows the rules. Caxton sidles up to Trouble and slowly rolls on his back to instigate play. If Caxton gets too riled up or takes advantage of his much larger size, Trouble calmly places his paw on Caxton’s nose or just holds it up in the air and waits. If Caxton does not still himself, Trouble backs away until Caxton goes through a belly-up plus play-bow routine of apology. Then the cat crouches low and the game begins again. The cat and dogs have agreed to cooperate in different ways: the elder animals together can behave with dignity and safely rest near each other, while the cat somehow elicits careful and controlled play from the teenage pup. Play behaviors are obviously one way that other animals display a sense of justice and fairness, and most people who share their lives with companion animals can likely tell a similar story to the one above. In The Emotional Lives of Animals, Bekoff argues that play behavior reveals the moral basis of other animal species.19 Furthermore, play behavior and its underlying rules reflect animal agency, because play cannot

18 It is also insulting to suggest that Binti does not know the difference between a plastic doll and a three-year-old human child. 19 Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals (California: New World Library, 2007), 86. He further notes that although Frans de Waal is not sure that nonhuman animals are moral beings, de Waal erroneously does not consider play behavior. In Gregory Bateson’s important earlier theory on ethology and cybernetics, he similarly points out how ordinary animal play necessarily involves the communication of “metacommunicative rules,” a point that acknowledges the complexity involved in play activities. See “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 180.

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take place without a trust that the other participants will follow the rules (which means that they also could choose not to). Bekoff writes of the surprise he sees when a dog violates the trust of play and the elaborate communication that it takes place to re-establish trust; he also tells of dogs who do not tolerate repeat cheaters and are chased from play groups.20 His research reveals that play requires a cooperation that he claims drives behavior more than competition does.21 Cooperation, we might add, requires a choice, and choice is part of what defines agency. To take this argument in a different direction, there are those who consider morality to be outside the realm of even human agency. E. O. Wilson has said that morality, like all human behavior, is adaptive, just another way to promote the continuity of genetic material: “morality has no other demonstrable function.”22 Even more controversial, perhaps, is the claim of philosopher Thomas Nagel that even humans cannot be fully responsible for their actions: How can one be responsible even for the stripped-down acts of the will itself, if [those acts] are the products of antecedent circumstances outside of the will’s control? [. . . .] The area of genuine agency, and therefore legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extension-less point. Everything seems to result from the combined influence of factors, antecedent and posterior to action, that are not within the agent’s control.23

In other words, no matter how we consider agency, the result is that either humans are more like the other animals or the other animals are more like humans than we have comfortably thought in the past. It is thus crucial to recognize that notions of animal agency are frequently squared against prevailing ideas about human agency. When it comes to the mental processes of another being, human or otherwise, there

20

Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals, 89–109 and passim. Bekoff here is challenging the traditional view that competition (survival of the fittest) is the prime mover of evolution, claiming instead that cooperation and friendliness are central to evolution of social behavior, making cooperation the key to survival. When animals cooperate, he says, “they’re doing what comes naturally, and cooperation relies on established, well-maintained standards of behavior—that is, moral codes. Th is is what should become the starting point for evolutionary theory and the basis for our discussions about the lives of animals” (107). 22 E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 167. 23 Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck.” Reprinted in Ethical Theory: An Anthology, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 360. 21

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is always a point beyond which each of us as individuals cannot comprehend. Where that point is, however, depends on things sometimes more significant than species difference. Jacques Derrida focused his investigation of thinking and agency on precisely this complexity of differences, refusing to accept simple distinctions between humans and nonhuman animals and working to complicate many other forms of difference. From a philosophical or theoretical perspective, his work offers many resources for clarifying, framing, and bridging these findings from other disciplines. Nearly forty years ago, Derrida offered an alternate route to considerations of language and mind in his influential book Of Grammatology.24 This study upsets the privileged role of the spoken word as the foundational measure of humanity and therefore of agency, arguing that “there is no linguistic sign before writing.”25 In that book, Derrida repositions “the trace,” the mark, the inscription as more fundamental than verbal language.26 While the consequences of this argument regarding nonhuman animals may not have been obvious at the time, in his most recently published text The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), Derrida insists that his “substitution of the concept of trace or mark for those of speech, sign, or signifier was destined in advance, and quite deliberately, to cross the frontiers of anthropocentrism, the limits of a language confined to human words and discourse. Mark, gramma, trace, and différance refer differentially to all living things, all the relations between living and nonliving.”27 In his relatively recent interview “‘Eating Well,’ of the Calculation of the Subject,” Derrida clarifies his stance regarding his definition of language: The idea according to which man is the only speaking being [. . .] seems to me at once undisplaceable and highly problematic. Of course, if one

24 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 25 Ibid., 14. 26 Ibid., 9. 27 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. MarieLouise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 104. This book collects and re-translates a serious of texts on animals, published in various locations, which began as a ten-hour lecture. In addition to revisiting some key moments in the translation, the book includes some material not previously published. See the Foreword, ix–xiii. We have cited this new edition, rather than the versions published earlier, because of these refinements.

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sarah e. mcfarland and ryan hediger defines language in such a way that it is reserved for what we call man, what is there to say? But if one reinscribes language in a network of possibilities that do not merely encompass it but mark it irreducibly from the inside, everything changes. I am thinking in particular of the mark in general, of the trace, of iterability, of différance. These possibilities or necessities, without which there would be no language, are themselves not only human. [. . .] And what I am proposing here should allow us to take into account scientific knowledge about the complexity of “animal languages,” genetic coding, all forms of marking within which so-called human language, as original as it might be, does not allow us to “cut” once and for all where we would in general like to cut.28

That is, Derrida’s fundamental revision of the definition of language does not permit the absolute and singular distinction, or cut, traditionally made between the human animal and all other animals. In this framework, we are permitted to recognize semiotic or embodied forms of communication common among animals as kinds of language, each in its own unique way, as well as many other forms of marking, including genetics. Indeed, Derrida shows how the very phrase “the animal,” commonly used to mean all animals, is itself a profoundly unreasonable usage, denying the manifest proliferation of differences that exists in animal lives, from lizard to dog, shark to lamb, camel to eagle, and so on (to cite some of his examples).29 Derrida’s argument upsets the strict conventional connection between human language, subjectivity, and agency, making room for the many new understandings of nonhuman animals, some of which we mentioned above. In a parallel fashion, similar theoretical reconsiderations have affected scientific arguments about method. Savage-Rumbaugh, Rumbaugh, and Fields, summarizing findings regarding animals’ use of language across a range of species, suggest that “many limitations expressed by the animal subjects to date are the limitations of our methods, not those of the subjects themselves.”30 They cite, for example, studies that have found that the human training of bonobos “actually inhibited language,” that the apes acquired language with a greater depth

28 Jacques Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell. Who Comes After the Subject? Ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991, 96–119), 116–17, his emphases. 29 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 34. See also 23, 29–32, and passim. 30 E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Duane M. Rumbaugh, and William M. Fields, “Language as a Window on Rationality,” in Rational Animals, ed. Susan Hurley and Matthew Nudds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 541.

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reaching into comprehension of the “syntax of novel utterances” as well as semantics when humans interfered less.31 De Waal has argued likewise about the question of whether apes have a theory of mind (awareness of others as thinking beings): “All that most experiments have done thus far is test the ape’s theory of the human mind. We would do better to focus on the ape’s theory of the ape mind.”32 Similarly, Pepperberg, companion to the recently deceased parrot Alex mentioned above, has argued that when assessing animal intelligence, scientists’ “focus should not necessarily be on the goal that is assumed relevant to human researchers who are concerned exclusively with cognitive processing, but rather should encompass goals that might be meaningful/useful/of interest to the animal subject within a broader perspective.”33 Pepperberg’s claim is supported by her observations of a parrot who systematically disobeys the request of the researcher to identify an item of a particular shape, color, and material, a complex undertaking he can normally complete. Since the bird is avoiding behavior that would win him a reward, he can seem in her words “intelligent” but not rational. Though Pepperberg does not pretend to finally know the bird’s motivation for this behavior, she recognizes that some new explanation is needed. She proposes, “The parrot may here be approaching a level of social understanding and rationality at which it manipulates the trainer’s behavior for its own reasons.”34 Obviously, then, the initial assumptions about animals’ rational and linguistic abilities become self-fulfilling prophecies: when researchers allow too little room for animals’ own novel forms of agency, the animals’ other, related abilities—in language, in reasoning—are also obscured. Allowing for animal agency, conversely, has proven to be self-reinforcing: bonobos who are permitted to use language for their own purposes show greater development in it. Beyond the suggestive and exciting implications for our understanding of animals’ abilities, these studies also show human “objectivity,” even in the sciences, is often far from objective. Both de Waal and Pepperberg urge ethologists to refine their methods of experimentation to better understand their animal subjects, to get closer to something like objective knowledge.

31

Ibid., 519. De Waal, Primates and Philosophers, 70. 33 Irene M. Pepperberg, “Intelligence and Rationality in Parrots,” in Rational Animals, ed. Susan Hurley and Matthew Nudds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 484. 34 Ibid., 483. 32

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In this sense, these are arguments for refining scientific methods, and they serve as examples of the limits of human rationality. Indeed, the editors of the volume housing these essays claim as much quite directly: “Why, then, does it matter whether animals are rational? It matters both for our understanding of other animals and of ourselves.” And they suggest, based on the findings published in their book, that “Perhaps our [human] rationality is more piecemeal, less theoretical, more embedded in and conditioned by our environments than we realize.”35 This conclusion shares much with the findings of Jamieson and Bekoff in an earlier collection of essays (which charted some of the territory explored by Hurley and Nudds’s later Rational Animals). Jamieson and Bekoff explain how greater cognizance of the function of science as “sometimes selfish, irrational, motivated by power and prestige rather than The Pursuit of Truth—in other words, [as] all too human” should lead scientists to become more self-reflective about methods in the study of animal cognition, particularly with regard to ethics in the treatment of animals.36 On such points, these scientists closely parallel Derrida’s fundamental critique of the philosophical tradition’s treatment of human/nonhuman difference(s). He challenges philosophers’ insistence, particularly Heidegger’s, that what separates the human from the so-called animal is human knowledge of the “as such” of reality, an awareness of reality not just through living experience, but also abstractly, objectively, including centrally an understanding of death. Derrida doubts that humans, in the final analysis, have such an understanding. He urges, in the closing of The Animal That Therefore I Am, that “there is no pure and simple ‘as such.’” Rather, there are pluriform understandings of the world, always connected to the (animal) need to remain alive; there are, in other words, differences among animals of all sorts, including human animals, and these differences exist in “an ‘animal’ relation.”37 35 Susan Hurley and Matthew Nudds, “The Question of Animal Rationality: Theory and Evidence, Editors’ Introduction,” in Rational Animals, ed. Susan Hurley and Matthew Nudds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 80. 36 Dale Jamieson and Marc Bekoff, “Afterword: Ethics and the Study of Animal Cognition,” in Readings in Animal Cognition, ed. Marc Bekoff and Dale Jamieson (Cambridge: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996), 359. This text investigates many of the same questions as the Hurley and Nudds text, though it offers greater focus on the issue of play. 37 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 160. Derrida makes a related point in slightly different form earlier in the book: He is “asking whether what calls itself human has the right rigorously to attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute

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This animalization of human beings is a constant theme of the work, one indicated clearly in its title cited above—The Animal That Therefore I Am—which names Derrida’s own writings as an example of human animality. Indeed, in a marvelous moment, Derrida figures the practice of philosophy as analogous to “wrestling, fishing, or hunting,” in which he treats major western philosophers like Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan “as a single living body” that he hopes “to take hold of [. . .] without hurting it too much, and especially without killing it,” using an animalistic and embodied register of terminology for this vaunted human activity of philosophizing.38 From a slightly different angle—one also relevant to our concerns here—Derrida’s essential claim at the root of these complex deconstructive arguments can be summarized with reference to another of his keywords: humans are less able than we have imagined ourselves to be. He refuses the fundamental Cartesian position, Cogito, ergo sum, by denying the “capability,” the “power” to assume an I, a selfhood, in such certain terms.39 The assumption of identity, in his account, is always more partial than that, always more “piecemeal,” to cite the term Hurley and Nudds use to describe human and nonhuman rationalities.40 Derrida draws this shift in notions of ability and subjectivity back to Bentham’s crucial proposal that the question to ask of animals is first “Can they suffer?” He shows how this question re-orients subjectivity, including that of humans, around weakness, mortality, and sentiment in addition to, and sometimes in contradiction with power or ability.41 A further sign of the limitations in human ability or agency also appears in Derrida’s insistence that every human action or communication, necessarily and traditionally connected to notions of selfh ood and agency, also brings some measure of “nonresponse, automatic reaction, mechanical reaction into the most alive, most ‘authentic,’ and most

to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever possess the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution” (135, his emphasis). 38 Ibid., 91–92. 39 Ibid., 92. Derrida scrutinizes a host of synonyms for ability, power, and capability throughout the book. See for additional examples 8, 27, 32, 103, and passim. 40 This stance resembles Thomas Nagel’s, discussed above. 41 Ibid., 27–28. For a lucid and compelling treatment of Derrida’s work on animals, and particularly his arguments about weakness and subjectivity, see Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), e.g. 53–60, 107, and passim.

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responsible response.”42 This point acknowledges the kind of approach E. O. Wilson has in mind when he disavows human agency. The very existence of language as a system that speakers must inhabit, a system that exists before and after individual humans, outside of our realm of control, is further evidence for this view. If Derrida insists on human animality and human weakness, like that of other animals, he clearly and strongly refuses a mere biological continuism, and this position makes room for a kind of agency: “I have thus never believed in some homogeneous continuity between what calls itself man and what he calls the animal. I am not about to begin to do so now. That would be worse than sleepwalking.” Rather, he means to make human/nonhuman differences more complex, to see them “increase and multiply.”43 This stance certainly allows us to recognize many forms of distinctness in animal life, human and nonhuman. Thus, his work takes hold of the philosophical tradition and criticizes it, but he does not, we saw above, mean to kill it or to deny its existence. He is insisting that we can reason, we can make decisions, we do have responsibility; or it is perhaps fairer to his analysis to say we cannot not reason, make decisions, and so on; and these activities are all part of his own undertaking. Indeed, Derrida takes the doubting and critical character of his discourse to be an example of human subjectivity and agency, leading him even to venture something like a universal claim: “casting doubt on responsibility, on decision, on one’s own being-ethical, seems to me to be—and is perhaps what should forever remain—the unrescindable essence of ethics, decision, and responsibility.”44 A biological continuism, on the other hand, would be too sure of everything. Human actions would need to appear as mere behaviors or mechanisms, without any trace of agency or possibility of surprise, and the same would of course be true of nonhuman animals. How could anything new ever occur in individual behavior without agency?45 This

42 Ibid., 112. See also 102 for a related discussion of the mechanisms involved in any form of response, whether human or not. 43 Ibid., 29–30. 44 Ibid., 126. 45 In “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida demonstrates how an “event” upsets a structure of any kind, preventing closure of that structure [in Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), trans. Alan Bass, 83]. Yet he shows how systems cannot be understood without acknowledging events, which means structures are nec-

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is why the increasingly numerous, surprising behaviors of nonhuman animals are so crucial to investigations of agency like our present undertaking. These animals, when entering a novel context, either on their own or when forced, react/respond in surprising ways—communicating, joking, helping, deceiving—ways that warrant the title of agency, even if it is always necessarily a partial, local, limited agency under Derrida’s lights. Derrida’s recognition of the role of mechanism, biology, animality in human life makes room for us to connect nonhuman animal actions to agency as well, always in a case-by-case, unique-in-each-instance fashion. Perhaps no animal—even a human one—has a pure agency, but many animals seem to have a kind of agency in this more limited sense, as the essays collected here help to demonstrate. Moreover, the manifest fact that our theory of agency, whatever it may be, affects what we notice of agency justifies and even necessitates the kind of interdisciplinary work ventured here. Though the studies of scientists clearly inform our conceptions of nonhuman animals, Derrida and others have shown how close scrutiny of human conceptions always necessarily inflects how we see animals. The “fictional” thought experiments of literature, animation, film and other cultural products can enable us to notice realities we had missed before by reframing reality in new ways. Despite this relatively long history of the view of animals as agents, however, it has received too little attention in the interdisciplinary field of animal studies. Several of the essays in the 2006 collection Killing Animals, for instance, consider animal agency in a glancing fashion,46

essarily open, exposed to surprise. Structures cannot be closed systems. This analysis, though directed at philosophical questions, applies also to issues of agency, whether human or nonhuman. The most powerful arguments seen to undermine agency, such as genetic determinism, fail to allow for an event in the life of an individual. Indeed, Derrida relies on the notion of “play” in linguistic systems to show how systems are always open to something new. “Play” in animal studies offers a rich connection to Derrida’s analysis, since it is an area where ethologists have often found innovative behaviors/actions that do not fit neatly into any sheer biological determinism. We have learned in Derrida’s recent work that this connection is very much to the point of his earlier analysis, as we showed above—he always had animals partly in mind as he developed his deconstruction of spoken language. 46 Clare Palmer, in her chapter “Killing in Animal Shelters,” explains that in “many circumstances [. . .] pets are able to transgress, or even to resist, human attempts to control or manipulate them [. . .]” (182). And the issue of animal agency is raised briefly in the roundtable discussion that was transcribed as the conclusion of this book. Again, Palmer asserts that “there is often a denial of animal agency” (197; see also 194–97). But these are passing remarks.

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but they do not focus intently on this crucial idea. Similarly, other valuable collections of critical animal studies such as Representing Animals (2002) and Zoontologies (2003) concentrate on important issues other than agency. We think it is time to focus on animal agency. As Martha Nussbaum has shown in Frontiers of Justice, once we develop a “sense of the animal itself as an agent and a subject, a creature to whom something is due, a creature who is itself an end,” a new set of obligations becomes incumbent upon us.47 Our collection offers a host of essays devoted to this task, hoping to be suggestive and broad rather than comprehensive. In that sense, the essays raise at least as many questions as they resolve. The unique perspectives that follow demonstrate that other animals can be thinking subjects, knowing subjects, self-conscious subjects: subjects with complex and substantial subjectivity that we call “agency.” However, that agency is expressed and oppressed in different ways, and these essays examine other animals engaging their own interests as represented in literature, scientific discourse, and film. This is a necessarily provisional and perhaps strategic account of agency. It is functional for the purposes of this collection, but more broadly we must also insist that agency is problematic. It depends on the animal in question, it depends on the circumstances, it depends on how agency itself is framed. What do we do, for example, with cases like that of the polyp, a relatively simple organism described in evocative detail in Laurence Simmons’s essay? Ought we regard the polyp as a kind of multiplicity or pack, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms?48 If so, what happens to notions of agency? Should we see the polyp as a kind of proto-animal? Or what? Such cases press hard on questions of agency and seem to us to open more questions about how we understand the relationships between the human and the nonhuman. And this is precisely our hope. 47 Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 337. Further, Nussbaum shows that when we confront the situation of animals, it is not exactly that we should expand the membership of beings who deserve just treatment, but rather that our very understanding of justice itself must change. She argues that justice must be conceived not in terms of social contract theory, in which equals agree on a notion of justice that benefits both parties, but rather according to her capabilities approach, in which justice is apportioned according to each living being’s particular form of life and its capacity to suffer. 48 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translation and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 26–38 and passim.

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In “Section I: Animals as Agents,” four essays examine the ways that real and fictionalized animal subjects manipulate their environments and express agency. In her essay “Whale Agency: Affordances and Acts of Resistance in Captive Environments,” Traci Warkentin argues that captive whales and dolphins engage in various acts of subversion in response to forced interactions with humans at Florida’s Sea World and Canada’s Marineland and that many of these acts are culturally transmitted between whales. Using Jakob von Uexkull’s principle of umwelt and theories of affordances from ecological psychology and phenomenological biology, she shows that the whales’ and dolphins’ resistance to their dependence on humans are acts of overt agency that demand human acknowledgement, thus furthering the development of more ethical human-whale relations. Shelly R. Scott’s chapter, “The Racehorse as Protagonist: Agency, Independence, and Improvisation,” claims that racehorses become central characters in narratives of conflict, described in terms traditionally reserved for human athletes, and that because they become mere personalities in the human constructions about racing, their acts of individual agency are reduced to aspects of the characters created for them. Using the case of racehorse Smarty Jones as her principal example, Scott examines animal agency and the issues of training, coercion, performance, and improvisation in thoroughbred horse racing. In “Consuming Timothy Treadwell: Redefining Nonhuman Agency in Light of Herzog’s Grizzly Man,” David Lulka examines the various forms of embodiment and agency in Werner Herzog’s film to expose the ways that Treadwell and Herzog construct bears for their own means: Herzog to enlarge the gulf between humans and other animals and Treadwell to diminish it. Lulka moves a step beyond these simplified binaries and onto an alternate path that allows for the distinctions between species but also allows for the agency of animals, opening to myriad kinds and methods of embodiment. Finally, Sarah E. McFarland examines the relationships between animal agency and environmentalism in two recent popular films starring animated animals, Happy Feet and Over the Hedge, in her chapter “Dancing Penguins and a Pretentious Raccoon: Animated Animals and 21st Century Environmentalism.” She exposes how these films depend on the recognition of another animal’s agency, but that they then disempower that moment of acknowledgment in various ways, leaving the animals simply as caricatures instead of as fictionalized actors demanding change that they might be otherwise.

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“Section II: Speaking Through Animals” begins with “No Human Hand? The Ourang-Outang in Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’” Stephanie Rowe’s sustained focus on the hand as it migrates through discursive and worldly positions exposes the “non-knowing” that operates in place of real knowledge about animal others in Poe’s story and scientific works of the time. She argues that it is because the police investigators cannot recognize the orangutan’s agency and misunderstand his gestural and verbal attempts to communicate that they do not consider him to be a suspect in the murder, raising questions about the ambiguity of humanity and animality. Next, Rebecca Onion claims that in Alaska in the early twentieth century, the relationship between humans and canines became the site for human ideas about agency, masculinity, and purity. Dog stories, she reveals in her essay “Sled Dogs of the American North: On Masculinity, Whiteness, and Human Freedom,” construct the ideal dog as being both an absolute agent, making choices from a place of innate intelligence or love for his human companion, and as a character who exposes the white Alaskan worker’s complicated relationship with wildness, freedom, and obedience. Finally, in “The Slave Whisperer Rides the Frontier: Horseface Minstrelsy in the Western,” J. J. Clark declares that the Uncle Tom stereotype from turn of the century minstrelsy reappears on the western frontier in the form of the stereotypical cowboy’s horse. She examines how Western horses are reduced to little more than a pedagogical device by authors intent on developing a new white masculinity, simultaneously revealing how they might be constructed as agents along similar lines to that of the traditional western mythos of the cowboy and his heroic horse. “Section III: Speaking For Animals” looks at three kinds of scientific discourse: the vivisection debates of the Victorian era; the ape language projects of the 20th century; and the rhetoric used in 21st century meetings that approve scientific testing on animals. Examining the debates between vivisectionists and their opponents in publications, speeches, pamphlets, and other literatures, Jed Mayer argues that at the center exist competing representations of animal agency in his chapter, “Representing the Experimental Animal: Competing Voices in Victorian Culture.” He contends that testimonies by real animals echo in the antivivisectionist representations of animals, allowing expressions of animal agency to communicate from the laboratory to the public. In “Forms of Life: the Search for the Simian Self in Ape Language Experiments,” Rebecca Bishop explores the notion of ape language

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from Plato’s contemplations to Koko’s famous claim the she is a “fine animal gorilla.” In dialogue with Agamben, Haraway, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, she contends that ape language projects raise questions about belonging and difference grounded in fundamental concerns about agency. Lastly, Debra Durham and Debra Merskin apply discourse analysis to protocol review meetings to determine if and how animal pain is described, whether committees discuss issues of agency, and whether there are cultural or psychological barriers that interfere with the effective enforcement of the committee’s decisions. Using Kuipers’ method of examining medical discourse, Saussure’s linguistic theory, Barthes’ arguments about cultural forms, Derridian analysis, and Foucault’s theories of power and agency to examine transcripts from meetings, Durham and Merskin conclude that protocol review committees mask their discomfort about animal agency and suffering for political reasons in their chapter, “Animals, Agency, and Absence: A Discourse Analysis of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee Meetings.” The fourth section, “HumAnimals and other Marginal Species,” examines various creatures at the periphery of social and species distinctions. Feral children mark a point or a zone in which animality and humanity cease to be distinguishable, argues Dipika Nath in “‘To Abandon the Colonial Animal’: ‘Race,’ Animals, and the Feral Child in Kipling’s Mowgli Stories.” After a discussion of feral children as a kind of taxonomic disorder, Nath reads Kipling’s Mowgli as an example of colonial racial politics that erases the feral child’s challenge to species membership. The absence of human language and self-identification alongside the asocial behavior of feral children traditionally caused scientific, philosophical, and cultural anxiety about their place in society—an anxiety that could only be assuaged by violently marking the human as non-animal and, significantly, the animal as killable. Nath explores the ways in which imperialist ideologies and practices of colonial control over natives and forest management for resource extraction are built upon simultaneous logics of race and species distinction. In “At the Top of the Hierarchical Ladder: Were-Animals in Annette Curtis Klause’s Blood and Chocolate and Patrice Kindl’s Owl in Love,” Cat Yampell explores representations of were-animals in literature, arguing that they complicate boundaries that traditionally differentiate humans from other animals and force readers to confront the similarities between species instead of the differences that are usually

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emphasized. She claims that acknowledging the similarities helps break down hierarchies of difference that promote human subjectivity at the expense of animal subjectivity and agency. Turning to another periphery, Matthew Candelaria focuses on animals whose agency is manifest in their ability to utilize our spaces for their own purposes: vermin. His chapter, “The Microgeography of Infestation in Relationship Spaces,” argues that because vermin (not a species, Candelaria points out, but an idea) share space intimately with humans, they offer a unique opportunity and an ideal perspective from which to overcome the human inability to consider itself as an animal, much less an animal subject. Finally, in “Crossing Over: (Dis)Ability, Contingent Agency, and Death in the Marginal Genre Work of Temple Grandin and Jim Harrison,” Ryan Hediger relies on disability theory and on Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to analyze Temple Grandin’s mixed-genre, autobiographical descriptions of her life and Jim Harrison’s novella The Beast God Forgot to Invent. He shows that these authors’ accounts of agency are not category dependent; they thus resist the convention that agency is the province only of those categorized as normal human animals. Instead, agency appears in these narratives precisely because their “characters” cross taxonomic distinctions like human/animal, abled/disabled, nonfiction/fiction. The collection closes with Laurence Simmons’ essay, “Towards a Philosophy of the Polyp.” This envoi is a detailed and captivating account of a lowly creature raised to glorious heights by the fascination it produces in those who view it. The way the essay moves from idea to idea, historical imbrication to imbrication, is marvelously polyp-like, as though it were itself tentacled, arriving finally at the conclusion that reaches toward the surface, perhaps as do the coral reefs in the atolls, suggesting to readers that this creature says much about our ideas of animals and agency. The polyp’s very existence casts simplistic notions of absolute human agency as mere science fiction. We read Simmons as though our powers to resist were mortified by Medusa. In other words, we begin to catch ourselves merely imitating the astonishing otherness of the natural with our metaphors, our figures, our philosophy. We catch ourselves, therefore, as our animal selves.

SECTION I

ANIMALS AS AGENTS

WHALE AGENCY: AFFORDANCES AND ACTS OF RESISTANCE IN CAPTIVE ENVIRONMENTS Traci Warkentin There are always a few ledges, a few cracks, in the seemingly “monolithic” wall of consent. —dian marino1 This is just what agency means: agents make things happen, they make their way in the world. —Edward Reed2

Phenomenological biologists contend that all beings live in relatively unique perceptual worlds, or to put it another way, all beings experience their worlds through unique, embodied sensory perspectives. The uniqueness of each perceptual world and perspective does not, however, imply an autonomy bordering on isolation or extreme individualism. On the contrary, these worlds are formed through an individual’s interactions with other beings and things, which are distinctively meaningful for them. One of the best known examples of this is perhaps Jakob von Uexkull’s description of a female wood tick’s world.3 He asks us to imagine a bubble around the tick, through which she experiences her world, and tells us some of the unique and significant features of her perception and perceptual environment. A female tick does not have sight (as many humans know it) and has a heightened sensitivity to mammalian body heat and the smell of the sweat of mammals.4 She can wait in what we might consider a ‘dormant’ state of being for up to sixteen years, clinging to a tall blade of grass, until an opportunity (or,

1 dian marino, Wild Garden: Art, Education, and the Culture of Resistance (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1997), 14. 2 Edward Reed, Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 19. 3 Jacob von Uexkull, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds,” in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, ed. and trans. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, Inc, 1957), 5–80. 4 Ibid., 7.

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affordance) appears in the form of a moving, warm, sweaty mammalian body. Her world must seem (feel, smell) radically different from one’s human world, in terms of scale, time and space, and in terms of what is of vital, sensory importance. The tick’s life-world, as she experiences it, is what von Uexkull terms her “umwelt.”5 While vividly effective, the image of the umwelt as a bubble can be somewhat misleading. One might assume a kind of extreme disconnection arising from the bubble, and so imagine that there is no possibility of common or shared experience. My bubble may be unique to my own gradient of significance, but it is also permeable. There are overlaps and intersections along these gradients of perceptual significance which make up whole umwelts, especially between beings with very similar bodies. And, even though her ‘tick world’ may be almost alien to my experiences, as a terrestrial embodied being I can still sense that there may be some shared elements in our environment, potentially significant to us both although in radically different ways. Moreover, there can be ephemeral and partial channels of communication, of lives intersecting. The way an individual organism perceives and so experiences the world, their umwelt, is shaped by the physical and physiological makeup of the organism’s body. These traits are related to, and appropriate for, the environmental context. For instance, the perceptual capabilities of a terrestrial animal may differ significantly from those of an aquatic animal. Whereas sensing heat and sweaty smells is highly important to a wood tick, sensing sound is highly important to whales, particularly when their vision is obscured in dark and murky waters. As such, many toothed whales can use echolocation, or biosonar,6 to explore their surroundings. To echolocate, a bottlenose dolphin sends out pulses of sound into the environment, which then bounce off other beings and material forms and return to the dolphin, creating an “acoustic image of the environment.”7 The sounds, or sonar signals, are produced by the dolphin’s nasal system and pass through the melon, a saclike structure made of a special kind of “acoustic fat,” located just beneath the forehead.8 According to Howard C. Hughes, “the melon acts as an acoustic

5

Ibid. Howard C. Hughes, Sensory Exotica: A World Beyond Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 87. 7 Ibid., 96. 8 Ibid., 94. 6

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lens that focuses the sonar beam”9 so that “sonar signals are emitted from the forehead as a focused beam of acoustic energy.”10 When the acoustic energy bounces back to the dolphin, it travels up the jaw bone, which is surrounded by acoustic fat like that found in the melon, to the inner ear near the brain to form an image of sound.11 There is still much not known or understood about echolocation, but marine biologists studying biosonar, like Patrick Moore, have learned that bottlenose dolphins can use echolocation to detect a wide range of variation in their environments. According to Moore, “the dolphin has an acute ability to extract information from [returning echoes]. The animal is capable of judging attributes of size, shape, composition (i.e., if the target is hollow or solid), and even target thickness from the echoes.”12 In fact, studies have shown that “dolphins can detect the presence of a water-filled steel ball 7.5 cm in diameter at distances up to 120 meters.”13 Although there has been considerably less research conducted with orcas, also known as killer whales, they are thought to echolocate in much the same way as they have similar anatomy to the bottlenose dolphins. Generally, orcas and bottlenose dolphins are also thought to have excellent hearing and eye sight.14 Learning about the sensory capacities of bottlenose dolphins and orca whales is necessary for appreciating their umwelts, and particularly for understanding how they actively modulate their explorations of, and interactions with, different environments. Marine mammal research scientist Patrick Moore and psychologist Howard C. Hughes both cite the work of prominent marine biologist Whitlow Au for an example of how bottlenose dolphins change the intensity of their outgoing echolocation signals in response to changes in “internal and external environmental conditions such as the ambient noise, target range, and target strength.”15 Au’s research shows that bottlenose dolphins indeed modify their signals in relation to the ambient environment, such as making the signal louder (more intense) in

9

Ibid., 97. Ibid., 96. 11 Ibid., 112. 12 Patrick Moore, “Dolphin Psychophysics: Concepts for the Study of Dolphin Echolocation,” in Dolphin Societies: Discoveries and Puzzles, ed. Karen Pryor and Kenneth Norris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 373. 13 Hughes, Sensory Exotica, 97. 14 Moore, “Dolphin Psychophysics,” 379. 15 Ibid., 374. 10

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noisy areas, and softer (less intense) in relatively quiet bays.16 A human analogy could be a human modifying the volume, loudness or softness, of their voice, such as shouting at a rock concert and whispering in a library. Such an interactive engagement with one’s environment can be further understood through the work of ecological psychologist James J. Gibson who studied the “ecological perception” of animals.17 Like von Uexkull, Gibson describes the perceptual worlds of animals as both meaningful and relatively unique to the experiences of each individual. Gibson states: The environment consists of the surroundings of animals. Let us observe that in one sense the surroundings of a single animal are the same as the surroundings of all animals but that in another sense the surroundings of a single animal are different from those of any other animal. . . . For any animal needs to distinguish not only the substances and objects of its material environment but also the other animals and the differences between them. It cannot afford to confuse prey with predator, own-species with another species, or male with female.18

Although both scholars avoid the term “consciousness” in their discussions, in spirit, their descriptions suggest at least a similar phenomenon of mind in animals, if not equal to how it is understood in human terms. They recognize abilities of discernment and decision-making in animals, such that they act upon and respond to reciprocating animals and things in their surrounds that are deemed significant. Gibson names these perceptual phenomena “affordances.”19 Affordances are opportunities for action; they are resources one perceives in an environment. Gibson provides the simple example that to say that a chair affords sitting may be like saying that a chair with the physical dimensions appropriate to an adult human body expresses a perceivable opportunity for sitting.20 Affordances are not simply the result of static properties, however. The chair comes into being as something for an adult human to sit on only in relation to a human who perceives its meaning as such. But, that is not to say that the chair is only a human construction which is projected onto

16

Hughes, Sensory Exotica, 99; Moore, “Dolphin Psychophysics,” 374. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 18 Ibid., 7. 19 Ibid., 9. 20 Ibid. 17

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an otherwise meaningless object. In other words, an affordance exists “out there” in the way that it does not simply exist in the mind of the perceiver, yet its meaning emerges in relation to beings who perceive it as an opportunity for action appropriate to their embodied actions and projects.21 Adrian Ivakhiv illustrates the interactive specificity of affordances as “inherent potentials”22 through a quotation from Carello who states that: “a relatively horizontal, rigid, extended surface approximately kneeheight of the ground is “sit-on-able” to a creature with the dynamic capability of maintaining balance while lowering its centre of mass until the buttocks are supported by the surface.”23 Moreover, affordances exist in shared environments. Their meaning is somewhat durable yet ultimately ephemeral; affordances are always present in the shared environment of many beings and come into specific instances of being in and through the business of living and interacting. Although they are described as opportunities, affordances are not always favourable courses of action. In certain situations, some affordances can inhibit action and others may need to be proactively avoided. As ecological psychologist and Gibsonian scholar Edward Reed explains, “they are opportunities for doing something, for obtaining certain resources, or hindrances such as traps and dangers.”24 Reed then distinguishes between the affordances of inanimate and animate objects, stating that “animate objects afford interaction,”25 and so, there can be an engagement in “mutual affordances”26 between beings. Affordances are, in a sense, “performed.” They are actively made, or enacted, as particular embodiments or structures. For example, a gesture made by an adult human body lunging forward over a low wall is an enacted embodiment and the deliberate placement and construction of a cement wall to separate whales from humans is an enacted structure. Both are embedded in the socio-material context and actively afford

21 John T. Sanders, “An Ontology of Affordances,” Ecological Psychology 9 (1997): 97–112. 22 Adrian Ivakhiv, “Toward a Multicultural Ecology,” Organization & Environment 15 (2002): 396. 23 Quoted in Ivakhiv, “Toward a Multicultural Ecology,” 396–97. 24 Edward Reed, “The Affordances of the Animate Environment: Social Science from the Ecological Point of View,” in What is an animal? ed. Tim Ingold (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 112. 25 Ibid., 112. 26 Ibid., 116.

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certain opportunities. Affordances are thus hybrid in the sense that they can emerge through performances involving mixed and disparate elements, such as a human body and a concrete wall. So conceptualized, the affordances of interactions in places like Sea World can be examined in terms of multiple, hybrid ‘whale-human-context’ networks. In terms of the phenomenal experience of such networks, humans, whales, water, multiple technologies of glass, cement, filtration pumps, generators and unequal power relations are all implicated in what can be thought of as a kind of “captive umwelt.” Compared to the umwelts of free-living whales, a captive umwelt is relatively impoverished and limited. Its most distinguishing characteristic is its enclosure. For example, considering again the echolocation of bottlenose dolphins and orcas, experiments provide some insight into how this way of sensing their environments is modulated in captive environments. According to Hughes, a comparison of the intensity of the sonar calls made between dolphins in aquarium tanks and dolphins in an open bay showed that “the sonar calls of dolphins in Kaneohe Bay were about 500 times more intense than those observed in aquarium tanks! In the tanks, the dolphin’s sonar signal is a whisper in comparison with that it produces in the open ocean.”27 Apparently, and it is not a stretch to imagine why, there is good reason for the dolphins to maintain a whisper in captivity, since, according to Hughes: Like the seafloor, the sides of the aquarium tank are excellent reflectors of sound energy. As a result, sonar signals reverberate off the sides and bottom of the tank, and the echoes are very intense. To the dolphin, it might seem a little like sitting inside a big bass drum while the band plays a rousing Sousa march.28

In captivity, then, bottlenose dolphins and orcas, and any whales who echolocate, must use only a fraction of their echolocating abilities or risk deafening themselves. Such an adaptation of their modes of sensing their surroundings is potentially frustrating, but the most compromising element of a captive umwelt is its restriction of mobility. Captive

27 Hughes, Sensory Exotica, 98. Hughes recalls that: “The first recordings of marine sonar calls were made in large aquarium tanks. Recorded intensities under these conditions were about 170dB. It turns out, however, that dolphins can produce sonar calls far in excess of 170dB. This was first shown by Whitlow Au and colleagues, who were the first to record marine sonar signals in the open water. In Hawaii’s Kaneohe Bay, dolphin calls reach intensities as high as 220dB.” 28 Ibid., 99.

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whales are not at liberty to leave or able to explore beyond the confines of the enclosure. Because of the conditions of captive umwelts, analyses of affordances in captive sites may also be particularly productive for understanding and illuminating whale agency and for understanding possible expressions of resistance. They disrupt notions of stimulusresponse and other mechanical descriptions of behaviour and assume that organisms have a perceptual awareness of their worlds. For instance, theories of ecological perception by Gibson29 and Reed30 assume that organisms are always already acting upon and within their environments; they are not inert until acted upon by external forces or stimuli. Their worlds continually come into being through their interactions. As Reed insists, “this is just what agency means: agents make things happen, they make their way in the world, or, in the present jargon, they encounter their environment.”31 He laments, as do Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger in the Introduction to this volume, that “sadly, this great Darwinian insight—that because behavior occurs in complex, variable environments it inevitably requires the capacity to use experience in functional ways—has been lost from much of psychology and biology for more than a century.”32 Like phenomenological biology, ecological psychology’s understanding of perception and action is explicitly different from theories of behaviorism33 which contend that animals act automatically out of conditioning or instinct in response to stimuli. Whereas a stimulus is considered an object which simply provokes a singular and predetermined response in the receptive animal, affordances are inter-actional phenomena, who/which in turn may evoke diverse responses depending upon the situation and the individuals involved. The perception of affordances is thus shaped not only by the animal’s sensory capabilities, but also by the individual’s awareness, memory and understanding of previous experiences. As John T. Sanders explains: “[J]ust as caves afford hiding and chairs afford sitting, just as electronic microscopes may afford holding the door open or winning the Nobel Prize, symbolic entities . . . offer a variety of affordances for organisms able to notice 29

Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Reed, Encountering the World. 31 Ibid., 19. 32 Ibid., 28. 33 For examples please see John B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review 20 (1912): 158–77 and B. F. Skinner, The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis (New York: Appleton-Century, 1938). 30

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them and whose experience prepares them to perceive their potential.”34 Combining insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception with Gibson’s ecological perception, Sanders integrates the “materiality of meaning” with notions of affordances to express how beings are situated within unique embodied perspectives and gain access to the world through their interactions with social and spatial agents.35 For example, Sanders envisions affordances emerging in the interplay between individuals and their world(s) and insists that this interplay involves both the unique sensory capacities of a being (like the tick’s sensitivity to mammalian sweat) and what is meaningful in the environment (such as the dog who provides warmth, nourishment and reproductive habitat for the tick). If affordances are understood as perceptual opportunities for action, then to assert that a being perceives affordances in the environment assumes that being has an awareness of its environment and of social relations within it. It further assumes a being’s capacity to perceive possible actions available in that environment. These assumptions coincide with the notion of a reciprocity of perception36 between beings, the understanding that just as I can see other animals in my perceptual field, so too can I be seen (smelled, heard, touched, tasted) by them. David Abram illustrates the phenomenological principle of the reciprocity of perception in The Spell of the Sensuous when he describes the experience of an ant crawling upon his arm.37 He senses the ant reacting to his movements and mood and realizes the shared nature of the encounter. Abram says: In relation to the ant I feel myself as a dense and material object, as capricious in my actions as the undulating earth itself. Finally, then, why might not this “reversibility” of subject and object extend to every entity that I experience? Once I acknowledge that my own sentience, or subjectivity, does not preclude my visible, tactile, objective existence for others, I find myself forced to acknowledge that any visible, tangible form that meets my gaze may also be an experiencing subject, sensitive to the beings around it and to me.38

34

Sanders, “An Ontology of Affordances,” 108, italics added. John T. Sanders, “Merleau-Ponty, Gibson, and the Materiality of Meaning,” Man and World 26 (1993): 287–302. 36 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1962). 37 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-thanhuman World (New York: Random House, Inc, 1996), 67. 38 Ibid., italics added. 35

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Appreciating the perceptual experiences of animals in phenomenological and non-mechanical terms further accommodates notions that individuals learn from their unique experiences, and can remember and apply such learning in later situations. Such flexibility and agency in adaptability disturbs assumptions that all animals are born with a fixed set of instinctual responses, programmed to be expressed when the proper stimulus is presented. Animals, even human animals, are constantly learning over the course of their own life times through actively engaging with their environments. Moreover, ecological perception and phenomenological biology encourage an appreciation of the significant differences in the way all animals perceive and perceptually encounter their worlds, and of the idea that all animals discern meaning and significance in relation with fellow beings and their environments.39 Further support is found in the work of renowned scholar Gregory Bateson who showed that interspecies communication involves keen perceptual attentiveness to the nonverbal cues of others and sophisticated levels of abstract thinking (interpreting each other’s signals as “signals”). After watching monkeys play-fighting in a zoo, Bateson theorized that social animals are “capable of some degree of metacommunication, i.e., of exchanging signals which would carry the message “this is play.”40 Indeed, as Peter Harries-Jones recounts: Bateson believed that any relationship between signals and learning was far more complex, and he wanted to show how Pavlovian interpretation of signals and reflex response stemmed from an impoverished understanding of communication. Signaling among animals also had to be considered as an aspect of interactive messaging, and animal interaction was surprisingly rich in action sequences of a paralinguistic sort—communicating ‘context’ in animal relationships.41

This awareness, as a humbling approach to start thinking about learning, communication, and the diverse perceptual experiences of animals (and of other humans for that matter), signals a need for careful attentiveness to the unique ways individuals outwardly express their agency in complex, social environments.

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Tim Ingold, ed., What is an Animal? (London: Unwin Hyman Ltd, 1988), 13. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), 179. 41 Peter Harries-Jones, A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 148. 40

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Figure 1. The interactive “half wall” at Dolphin Cove, Sea World. Photo by Traci Warkentin.

With these understandings of agency from ecological psychology and phenomenological biology, I now turn to a discussion of the affordances of aquariums I investigated during recent fieldwork in Orlando, Florida. I observed distinct opportunities for action for humans and dolphins at Dolphin Cove, located in the Sea World, Orlando theme park. The overall purpose of Dolphin Cove is to enable human visitors to interact with dolphins by feeding them fish sold on-site near the pool. My discussion here focuses on the affordances associated with the wall surrounding the pool (Figure 1), which come into being through the touch-and-feed interactions. The static, physical properties that are most relevant to facilitating opportunities for touching and feeding interactions at the wall include: – – – – – –

the height and dimensions of the wall; the density and sturdiness of the wall; the anatomic structure of human bodies (height, width, shape); the anatomic structure of the dolphins’ bodies; the proximity to the water of the pool; and, the height of the water’s surface.

However, by focusing on the dolphins and expressions of their individual agency in relation to the wall, I will show how these physical properties also afforded the bottlenose dolphins opportunities to avoid interactions of touching and feeding. Furthermore, it was not just the wall, existing by itself; the affordances came into being dynamically as

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Figure 2. Just out of reach. Photo by Traci Warkentin.

human bodies leaned against the wall and their arms reached out over it. The wall’s own qualities were indeed relevant, but it was in-relation with the body that it took on particular meaning for the humans and the dolphins in the interaction. For example, the half wall became an integral and tangible actor in the ‘lunge and lean’ pattern. At first, the wall was enabling as humans’ thighs braced against it as they lunged over the top of the wall and the dolphin leaned away from the wall-human hybrid being performed. At a certain point in the embodied performance, however, the wall changed in relation and became a barrier to the humans to move any further toward the dolphins. So, the dolphins could position themselves relative to that point and remain just out of reach (as shown in Figure 2), thus avoiding unwanted touch. Likewise, another relevant structure attached to the wall was active in, and meaningful for, either facilitating or inhibiting opportunities for tactile interactions. A one-foot-wide ledge at the base of the interactive wall on the pool side ran along the entire perimeter, and was situated just below the surface of the water. With the ledge as part of the hybrid performance, a dolphin was presented with several opportunities for action. In one scenario, a dolphin could approach the wall and lean against the ledge to hold a steady position with her/his mouth open, and solicit the giving of a fish and/or allow the human’s hand to reach over and make contact. Here, the ledge in relation with the dolphin’s body formed the hybrid performance enabling the dolphin to receive fish or to be touched. The same ledge, like the wall, however, can also have served to separate humans and dolphins as it marked the approximate distance an

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Figure 3. A dolphin watches from just beyond the ledge (visible at bottom of photo). Photo by Traci Warkentin.

adult human can reach when leaning over the wall. Therefore, dolphins could position themselves, or swim along, just beyond the ledge, and remain out of reach (Figure 3), which I experienced first-hand and noticed repeatedly in my video footage. In a radically different way, the wall presented opportunities for the dolphins to both avoid being touched and to potentially transgress the rules set by Sea World staff. The dolphins at Dolphin Cove have learned that the fish are inside white paperboard trays and have figured out how to grab the trays off the wall. I think it is safe to assume that this particular situation has never occurred in non-captive habitats of bottlenose dolphins; this is not an evolutionary response inherited from their ancestors and coded into the dolphins’ genes. And yet, it happens. Visitors were explicitly warned about this by Sea World staff and were asked to make sure that the white fish trays were not visible to the dolphins. Fish trays were placed on the outside edge of the wall, rather than on the top, so that the dolphins would not get the opportunity. The potential action of taking the white trays presents a finding in my research which supports my application of the theoretical insights of ecological psychology, phemenological biology, and phenomenology for exploring affordances and embodied agency. For example, drawing

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upon their understandings of umwelts and ecological perception (how worlds come to be through interactions with an immediate environment) enabled my awareness and evaluation of what was perceptually significant to the bottlenose dolphins. In this case, the white trays, the fish they contained and the wall that they sat upon all appeared to hold special significance to the dolphins at Dolphin Cove. The finding of the white trays also provides a cogent example of how animal agents learn through interacting with other social agents and their environments. As Sanders sums up: “We are not committed, of course, to some static set of presuppositions and expectations that doom us forever to some one way of looking at things. We learn, and we change. What are perceived are affordances, best understood in terms of significance to us.”42 At Dolphin Cove, the bottlenose dolphins learned through unique, interactive experiences that the white trays held fish and that they can sometimes reach them on the wall. They modified their actions in relation to these knowledge-making experiences. The white trays have become significant perceivable objects in the captive umwelts of these particular bottlenose dolphins and associated with the fish meal they contain. At some point, individual dolphins figured out ways to get their bodies up out of the water, moving in relation to the wall and humans, and to grab white fish trays off the wall and into their mouths. According to the desired and enforced social organization of human activities at the interactive wall in Dolphin Cove, this is not supposed to happen. I heard staff members repeatedly alert human visitors to the possibilities of the dolphins nabbing the white trays and caution them to make sure that the trays were not only out of reach, but out of sight. Attached to the warning was typically the reasoning that if a dolphin nabbed a paperboard tray, they might eat it as well as the fish, and that would be bad for their health. To this I often heard added the obvious consequence that then “you won’t have any fish to give.” Clearly, if the dolphins took the fish for themselves, they would not have to be touched in order to eat. Visitors were told to be vigilant to not allow this potentially subversive act to occur. If a dolphin successfully “stole” a fish tray, the act would undermine the original purpose of the fish, which was to lure the dolphins close to the wall to enable human interactions, like touching and taking photographs. The dolphins could thus transgress the

42

Sanders, “Merleau-Ponty, Gibson, and the Materiality of Meaning,” 296.

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routine of what was supposed to happen according to human desires and expectations, and assert their own desires and agency. By taking the white fish trays, the dolphins may be expressing resistance to particular conditions of captivity, such as their dependency upon humans for providing food. Their actions seem to express those “cracks in consent”43 that dian marino suggests can emerge in varied and subtle forms and in response to many kinds of oppressions. While I do not know how meaningful the term “dignity” is to a bottlenose dolphin, I suspect that the ability to feed themselves may hold some significance. Certainly, opportunities for choice, choosing when and what to eat, is important for agents, for whom the deprivation of which could be very frustrating to say the least. Indeed, “[c]hoice is part of what defines agency.”44 In terms of my analysis of the kinds of actions that are afforded by the space, the dolphins were demonstrating that the white trays were meaningful opportunities for action, and were enacting a spatial awareness of where the trays were in relation to their bodies, the surface of the water and the wall. To reach a white tray sitting on top of the half wall, a dolphin would have to enact a hybrid performance of their body in relation to the wall and the water. By expressing their embodied agency and individual spontaneity in such a noticeable way, the bottlenose dolphins at Dolphin Cove, Sea World remind us that the social milieu and physical structures of each site and experience are not only relevant for the human participants involved. This is an important reminder, as the structure and organization of aquariums like Sea World communicate strong messages to the contrary, and convey assumptions that human beings are the only subjects with agency engaging in activities available in the marine park. As Alexander Wilson says in The Culture of Nature, nature parks, zoos, and theme parks are “all kinds of cultural landscapes.”45 More importantly, Wilson explains that “zoos, safari parks, and aquariums are explicit, even intentional, models of relations between human cultures and the natural world . . . they are constructed environments that often tell us more about ourselves than they do about what we’re ostensibly

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marino, Wild Garden, 15. Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger, “Animals and Agency: Understanding the Acts of Others,” The Introduction to this volume. 45 Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991), 223. 44

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looking at.”46 And they show us a very particular idea of ourselves that is based upon how dominant Western society narrowly defines what it means to be a rational human (particularly regarding gender, race, and sexuality), rather than about the whales themselves. Ultimately, the lesson is that consumption is meant to be the primary activity and mode of encounter as visitors are encouraged to engage in many forms of it throughout the park. It is even sold as a form of ecological concern. As Susan Davis tells us in Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience, the script in the Shamu show says “just by being here, you’re showing that you care!” In this logic, a visit to the nature theme park is a form of action on behalf of the environment.”47 In Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World, Jane Desmond finds the same emphasis upon, and facilitation of, consumption at Marine World Africa.48 Predominantly, the prominence of consumption at aquariums is directly linked with the design of aquariums, such as access via underwater viewing windows, to enable and enhance visual modes of encounter. As Desmond notes, the “free use of cameras, shops selling film, slides and postcards, and the provision of photo spots to stage the memory, all underline the importance of visual consumption, visual framing, and visual documentation of bodily difference to the tourist enterprise.”49 Not surprisingly, there is often a voyeuristic quality to the aquarium experience. Strategic framing and lighting provide a strong sense of who is viewing and who is being viewed. Typically, “the exhibits are lit, but we are in darkened rooms. Like peeping toms staring in through a lighted window, we observe unobserved.”50 I found this to be the case at Sea World, Orlando and at Marineland, Canada. Both aquariums provided transparent underwater viewing windows below their whale pools. Without exception, the human side of the underwater viewing areas were dimly lit, if at all, so that the visible portion of the pool lit up the window from the inside and it appeared much like a giant television screen. With humans standing in semi-darkness and the whales clearly visible in the pool, it was obvious who was supposed to 46

Ibid., 246. Davis, Spectacular Nature, 39. She adds that “entertainment, recreation, public relations, marketing, social mobility, and environmental concern run together to become essentially the same thing: the theme park.” 48 Desmond, Staging Tourism, 193. 49 Ibid., 183. 50 Ibid., 181. 47

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be looking and who was supposed to be looked at. The window was both a barrier and a mode of access. The space did not afford touching, but was designed and set up to provide visual access for humans into the ‘private’ underwater worlds of the whales. With its deliberate and obvious framing of the whales in the pool, it is likely that many human adult visitors encountered the window as if they were looking at a piece of living art or a show on television. In either case, they may not have been expecting the whales they were looking at to look back at them. The body language of adult humans standing in the viewing areas typically suggested an air of detachment and power through physical distancing and a closed posture: standing back several feet from the window, legs slightly apart, torso leaning back, arms crossed under the chest. This was the most common pose I saw. For the majority of the time I spent observing humans and whales at underwater viewing windows, dominant assumptions of human-whale power relations were confirmed: the whales rarely, if ever, looked out the window at the humans. I saw the same general patterns in the behaviour of the orca whales at Sea World and Marineland, as well as the bottlenose dolphins at Dolphin Cove in Sea World. Individual whales repeatedly swam slowly around the pool in circles with their eyes closed. The remarkable consistency in behaviour across individuals, species, and locations suggests that the structure of the sites themselves largely influences the way the whales move and interact within the pools. At one point, it occurred to me that the whales may have closed their eyes to deliberately ignore that they were being looked at. They may have been attempting to reduce their overall sensory bombardment, considering the acoustically charged environment of the pool. Perhaps they were pretending, in their own way, to make the humans disappear or to be somewhere else? This is potentially anthropomorphic speculation on my part; however, at the very least, closing their eyes was a sure sign that, at that moment, they were not interested in looking at or engaging with the humans on the other side of the glass. Interestingly, the window could have potentially afforded interactions such as those Reed describes as “social affordances,” occurring “when two or more agents realize affordances in a mutual way.”51 In this case, the same window afforded humans to look in and whales to look out,

51

Reed, “The Affordances of the Animate Environment” in Ingold, What is an Animal?, 121.

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and thereby look directly at each other, to make eye contact. However, it appeared that most of the time the social affordances that Reed identifies as embodiments of “propriety” did not occur via the window. Reed explains that “in socialized interaction the agents’ relations are further constrained by the perceived need to present proper affordances to the other.”52 Intentions make a huge difference. Attempting to communicate and engage with whales, as fellow subjects, through an underwater viewing window can, in some cases, be proper behaviour. However, looking through a window to watch the private lives of others, and to objectify the whales by not expecting them to look back and with no intention to allow oneself to be seen, is not. That is voyeurism. Unfortunately, captive spaces of encounter encourage such an objectification of the whales in the exhibits. Aided by the “despotism of the eye,”53 the visual distancing contributes to a broader sense of ecological disembeddness and remoteness from the environment and other animals for privileged human subjects.54 The minimal labeling which is also typical of aquariums reinforces the emphasis on visual consumption. I noticed a distinct lack of signage at most of my fieldwork sites, with Marineland, Canada appearing to be the worst. For example, one day while conducting participant observations of the touch-and-feed interactions at Arctic Cove, I was approached by a couple who wanted me to take their photograph in front of the pool. As I did, they asked, “By the way, do you know what these are?” and they gestured toward the beluga whales. I was baffled, and as I looked around, I saw that there was not a single sign on or around the pool to identify the beluga whales. Not only were the whales anonymous as individuals, but they were completely unidentified as a species, which can send the message that the beluga whales are really just something nice to look at. Such messages are embedded in the very structures and practices of captivity, as the material boundaries of glass and cement reinforce conceptual separations of humans from the rest of nature. Moreover, the dependency of the whales upon humans for basic needs, such as food, maintains a hierarchical power structure of which humans are on top and in control. Such a ranked, radical separation enables, as Val Plumwood asserts, “ethical systems that would reduce the more-than-human 52

Ibid., 121. Evernden, The Natural Alien: Human and Environment (2nd ed.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 83. 54 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002), 237. 53

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other and minimize what is owed to them, leave that other maximally open to regimes of commodification that in turn support privilege and its typical illusions of power over and apartness from nature.”55 In this light, aquarium structures appear to be simultaneously the products of, and reproductive of, “an anthropocentric logic of human self-imposition [that] has been masquerading as rationality since at least the Enlightenment, as conceptual machinery for commodifying and getting the most out of the radically reduced Other that is nature.”56 The ultimate project, according to Plumwood, then, is to “counter those maladaptive forms of reason that radically distance us from the non-human sphere and disguise or disappear our ecological embeddedness and vulnerability in order to develop a communicative, place-sensitive culture which can situate humans ecologically and nonhumans ethically.”57 For instance, Plumwood calls for a “de-homogenisation” of human and animal categories,58 which would necessitate that aquariums identify whales as individuals. This could take many forms, with the most obvious being to refer to the whales by name. There is a significant difference, however, between using individual names and using a generic name to individualize whales, which is the case with “Shamu.” “Shamu” is a trademark, not a name, and it serves to reinforce homogenisation as all the orcas at Sea World are indiscriminately called “Shamu.”59 Moreover, Plumwood suggests that “counter[ing] those maladaptive forms of reason that radically distance us from the non-human sphere”60 also requires a corresponding radical reconfiguration of relational spaces of whale-human encounter. One simple, yet potentially dramatic, change could be to light up the human side of the underwater viewing area at aquariums. It sends a message that humans are not the only ones doing the looking. It recognizes whale subjectivity, agency, and the reciprocity of perception. Lighting could further hinder tendencies of objectification as the sense of voyeurism would be greatly diminished.

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Ibid., 238. Ibid. 57 Ibid, 239. 58 Ibid. 59 As Shamu, the orcas are reduced to caricature in much the same way Sarah E. McFarland describes the disempowering of agents in her essay, “Dancing Penguins and a Pretentious Raccoon: Animated Animals and 21st Century Environmentalism.” See this volume. 60 Ibid. 56

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Together, representations of whales enacted by aquariums, as well as the very structures of captivity appear to aggressively work against recognitions of the whales as unique individual subjects with agency. This is why attentiveness to diverse expressions of whale agency is all the more important in captivity. Although the messages embedded in aquarium structures suggest otherwise, the whales are not passive, visual objects, and they often express their agency in surprising ways despite the limiting conditions. Indeed, several orca whales at Marineland, Canada provide an exceptionally cogent reminder of their keen awareness of their environments, their capacity to learn and to learn from each other, and their ability to make things happen for themselves. The orca whales at Friendship Cove in Marineland, Canada made news headlines in February 2006 when scientist Michael Noonan announced that he had observed “cultural learning” in their behaviour. According to Lee Dye of ABC News, Noonan had been conducting fieldwork to study their acoustic communication, when, one day, he noticed that one of the young male orcas had a gull in his mouth.61 Not long after, Noonan actually witnessed the male orca catch a gull using an ambush hunting technique. As Noonan describes in the article, “the whale spit fish at the surface of the pool and then sank below and waited. The gull came down to get the fish, and the whale grabbed it.”62 Already intrigued, Noonan was even more excited about his findings when, a few weeks later, he observed another of the orcas using the same technique. He reported that within the year, both of the adult female orcas were also seen catching gulls by setting the trap, and even the baby, Athena, was seen mimicking their behaviour. Noonan’s claim that the whales are demonstrating cultural transmission is hugely significant. Evidence of culture in other-than-human animals remains hotly contested within animal behavior and ethology as it has direct relevance for animal ethics. Dominant perspectives within environmental philosophy are based upon a model which extends moral consideration outwardly from an established core of human rights. Moral consideration may be extended to animals deemed to possess certain human-like characteristics, such as agency, self-awareness, and language. Cognitive abilities, such as those necessary for the kind

61 Lee Dye, “Scientists Discover How Killer Whales Learn to Hunt,” ABC News, February 1, 2006, http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=1561686. 62 Ibid.

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of cultural transmission that Noonan has observed, could potentially qualify whales as subjects of human moral consideration. This outcome would challenge current justifications for keeping whales in captivity and the ethical appropriateness of using them to make money. However, the trapping activity Noonan witnessed which supports his theory is already remarkable in itself and directly relevant to this essay. The “inventor” of the technique devised a way of catching his own food. Then, using the trap, he and the orcas at Friendship Cove were able to feed themselves, likely for the first time since they had been put in captivity. Moreover, they were taking the fish that they had been given by humans, the trainers or human participants in the touch-and-feed, and using it as bait to catch their own food, rather than simply eating the fish they were given. Their actions stand out to me as possible expressions of resistance to their dependency upon humans for food. What is also intriguing is that the orcas at Marineland were expressing agency in a way very similar to the bottlenose dolphins stealing the white trays of fish at Dolphin Cove in Sea World. And, by the same token, the bottlenose dolphins at Sea World have learned from each other, and so were also demonstrating cultural transmission. However, the dolphins have not received any attention or recognition as such. Overall, the actions of the bottlenose dolphins and orca whales recalled and discussed in this essay are surely a testament to the everpresent yet largely unattended to embodied agency of whale individuals in captive environments. Acts of avoiding touch, stealing fish trays and ambushing gulls suggest that the whales are expressing “cracks in consent;”63 that is, they may be demonstrating a kind of resistance to the routine ways things are done in these places, to the hegemony of captivity. The more we humans learn about the sensory perception of whales, about their umwelts, and the more attentive we become to the affordances, or opportunities for action, present in the spaces of whalehuman encounter, the more visible and recognizable diverse forms of whale agency may become. Such a recognition may enable us to think beyond the dominant Western dualistic ontology which radically divides and ranks human subjects above animal objects. Attentiveness to agency may enable us to see beyond stereotypical representations of species on display, so that we encounter real, live whale individuals and appreciate their significant otherness without reducing them to

63

marino, Wild Garden, 14–5.

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aesthetic, consumable objects. There is much to be gained by this; as Mary Midgley sums up, “we can have duties to people, but not to things. So if animals are things, it does not matter how we treat them.”64 In other words, humans predominantly do not recognize moral duties to those beings they perceive as objects, as things. Ultimately, acknowledging agency and perceiving whales as individual subjects is vital to the development of ethical human-whale relations as they help to disrupt prevailing assumptions that only humans have agency and are thus the only species worthy of moral consideration.

64 Mary Midgely. Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (London: Routledge, 1995), 208.

THE RACEHORSE AS PROTAGONIST: AGENCY, INDEPENDENCE, AND IMPROVISATION Shelly R. Scott One of the first things I remember learning about my home state is a favorite adage of its citizenry: Kentucky is the home of fast women and beautiful horses. It was years before I got the joke, and I still mull it over from time to time. On the surface, the old saying is merely a derogatory comment on women, but the truth it reflects about the state of things in my home state is that the worth of a thoroughbred is not infrequently prized above that of a person—a non-white male person, that is. It was only when I moved away from home as an adult that I came to realize that what Kentuckians view as a way of life—horse racing—most Americans treat as just another sport. Like most sports, the elements of drama inherent in a horse race draw the casual spectators into the world inhabited by the athletes. The great horses—the champions—become more than sports figures. They become characters at the centers of elaborate narratives: not just performers in arenas but players in dramas. High-profile thoroughbred protagonists are constructed as characters through anthropomorphism. Character is defined by H. Porter Abbott as a “human or humanlike entity,” and he elaborates by stating that “characters are any entities involved in the action that have agency.”1 Assigning human qualities to the animals qualifies them as characters, and the constructions attribute agency to the animals. Discounting thoroughbreds as characters, John Jeremiah Sullivan claims, “Beasts do not make good protagonists, for the simple reason that unless you have money riding on their success or failure it is impossible for anyone older than ten to identify with them fully.”2 As evidence, he attributes the success of Laura Hillenbrand’s book on racing champion Seabiscuit (2001) to the fact that it spends most of its time on

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H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 188. 2 Jeremiah Sullivan, “Horseman, Pass By: Glory, Grief, and the Race for the Triple Crown,” Harper’s Magazine, October 2002, 53.

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the human team members, not the horse in its title.3 While I concur with Sullivan’s assessment of what attracted so many to the Seabiscuit story, I find abundant instances in the racing industry of fans “identifying” with horses (as fully as they do with human athletes) without placing a bet. 2004 Kentucky Derby winner Smarty Jones was constructed, by the media and his team members, as the protagonist in an underdog, against-all-odds fairy tale, and it inspired American adults as well as children, who sent hordes of letters and emails to the horse. In 2005 no one could get enough of the story of Preakness and Belmont Stakes winner Afleet Alex, known as “the little colt that could”—a dramatic tale emphasizing how he survived being born to a mother that produced no milk and was named after a little girl who died of cancer. The story of Barbaro, the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner who broke an ankle in the Preakness Stakes, overshadowed all other sports news as daily reports of his life-threatening condition proliferated on television and the internet. Letters were sent to Seattle Slew and Secretariat, and after the legendary horses retired, people made pilgrimages to see them, not the trainers or the owners.4 When racing legend Man O’ War died in 1947, he was the first horse to be embalmed; he lay in state for three days while two thousand people filed by the coffin.5 Such horses are protagonists, central characters in narratives of conflict, created by people inside and outside the racing industry who are inspired by the athletic prowess the horses display. By constructing the horses in terms usually reserved for humans, we reduce the animals to mere personalities instead of recognizing them as individuals we cannot fully comprehend. I argue that while anthropomorphizing horses attributes agency to them as constructed characters, the act of interpreting animal behavior as if it is human does not empower animals; rather, it undermines their differences. Following the lead of other performance studies scholars, here I present the sports field as a theatrical playing area. The nature of the race, the track conditions, and the field of horses are just some of what contribute to the mise en scène of the performance. But it is the narrative that completes the drama of the race event. The narratives that concern me are those in which the horse plays the part of protagonist 3

Sullivan, “Horseman,” 53. Steve Wilstein, “Sportsview: Why World Loves Smarty Jones,” 3 June 2004, http:// www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/. 5 Sullivan, “Horseman,” 54. 4

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and the conflict faced is the competition of the race. Part of the construction of the narrative involves reading, or framing, the horse’s behavior as a desire to win or a disappointment in loss. Garry Marvin asserts that “animals—without being aware of performing—can have their behaviour read, responded to and experienced as though they were.”6 I interpret the thoroughbreds’ actions as performance in order to query what the animals may actually be aware of and what is merely perceived as awareness by the people who watch them. Examining animals’ awareness through their actions leads me to question how they behave as independent agents. Agency may be defined as an intentional exertion of power, involving more than merely action or reaction. With agency comes choice and responsibility because it is rooted in free will. This essay addresses two large questions regarding animals as agents: Are animals capable of acting on choices made independently? If so, how much agency do humans permit them to exercise within performance settings? On the surface, the particular animals I have researched over the past several years—show dogs, theme park performers, and racehorses—do not make strong examples of animal agents. Humans command them in a variety of ways. The animals are led, coerced, directed and corralled, but none of them are given free reign because that would alter the performances in unpredictable ways. Writing about unpredictability posed by animal performances, Jane C. Desmond notes that a capacity for improvisation implies agency.7 Here I demonstrate how thoroughbreds improvise in human-engineered races, revealing their capacity for agency. Agency by these animals is exercised in ways similar to that of colonized peoples, as it must be exerted within domains that do not belong to them. Both oppressed animals and people deal with limitations imposed on their capacity for agency by rebelliously or subversively exerting their own wills. Michel de Certeau writes of Indians oppressed by colonizing Spaniards: Submissive, and even consenting to their subjection, the Indians nevertheless often made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them

6

Garry Marvin, “Natural Instincts and Cultural Passions: Transformations and Performances in Foxhunting,” Performance Research 5.2 (2000): 109. 7 Jane C. Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 214.

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shelly r. scott with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept. They were other within the very colonization that outwardly assimilated them.8

Like the other de Certeau describes, the performing animals may not always follow the commands of those in charge, thereby exerting agency and independence even while human hands hold the reins. I present examples of horses subverting commands under which they are expected to operate, proving their capability for agency, even beyond what humans intend to allow. I preface the case study, with its examples of specific individuals, with a broader approach to the question of agency by surveying a debate among performance scholars about whether animals’ behavior constitutes performing, in the same way we think of humans performing for an audience. The Animal as Performer Scholars tend to measure the performance capabilities of animals by comparing them to humans. Interpretations of similar behaviors vary, though, setting the stage for debate. One perception is that animals respond to cues automatically, primarily by reflex; a different view asserts that animals are thoughtful and willful in executing actions. Richard Schechner shares the first perception and writes that “most animal performances are automatically released, fixed, and stereotyped.”9 Elsewhere, he identifies a vital difference between animal and human performers. He describes ritual displays of humans and animals: Humans do consciously, by choice, lower animals do automatically; the displaying peacock is not ‘self-conscious’ in the way an adolescent male human is on Saturday night. The behavior of peacock and boy may be structurally identical; but self-consciousness (and not just ‘objective’ stimulation) sets most animal ritual off from non-human primate and human performance.10

In both quotations Schechner emphasizes animal behavior as “automatic,” which may also be understood as “instinctual.” This is in contrast

8 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xii. 9 Richard Schechner, Essays on Performance Theory, 1970–1976 (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977), 225, 248. 10 Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 94.

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to human behavior, which involves choice and awareness, suggesting that one must intend to perform in order to be considered a performer in the strictest sense. I find Gregory Bateson’s concept of “frame” useful to this discussion; he uses the term as a principle of organization governing an event and participants’ involvement in it.11 A frame, in this sense, is necessary to make behavior performance. Marvin’s statement, quoted earlier, regarding animal behavior being read as performance draws attention to the perception and interpretation of the animal’s activity, shifting emphasis from animal capability to viewer response. Desmond also addresses reception when she describes how the human performers are seen “through a theatrical frame that recognizes them as actors playing a role,” while the animals’ actions are perceived as real, so that they are “performing themselves.”12 Thus, the performance becomes a mix of human fiction and animal documentary. A distinction not up for debate is that humans can pretend to be others while animals cannot. A possum can play dead, but it cannot take on the character of a raccoon. Here is at least one limitation on animal agency; of course, human agency is not without its own limitations as well. While Marvin and Desmond discuss the framing of performance in terms of spectator perception, others focus on the animal trainer’s role as framer. Semiotician and former circus owner Paul Bouissac states that an animal does not perform so much as it “negotiates social situations by relying on the repertory of ritualized behavior that characterizes its species.”13 The trainer “frames these interactions” with animals that consist merely of natural responses to appear as performances.14 David Williams describes this perspective as humans “recontextualizing [animal responses] to provide spectators with what they desire: charged narrative imagery and the illusion of an erasure of socio-biological ‘otherness’; in other words, the illusion that the animal recognizes and shares the world of the social situation in which he is placed.”15

11 Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” Psychiatric Research Reports 2 (1955): 39–51. 12 Desmond, Staging Tourism, 188. 13 Paul Bouissac, “Behavior in Context: In What Sense Is a Circus Animal Performing?” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 364 (1981): 24. 14 David Williams, “The Right Horse, The Animal Eye—Bartabas and Théâtre Zingaro,” Performance Research 5.2 (2000): 19. 15 Ibid., 34.

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Spectators prefer thinking the animal and human are mutual and willing partners in performance. Bouissac’s claim that animal behavior is pre-programmed resonates with Schechner’s idea of automatic activity. By attributing this only to animals, what remains to be addressed is that human behavior in performance may also be automatic or programmed. Other scholars see little difference between human and animal responses and reject a model like Bouissac’s as reductive. Marvin Carlson refutes Bouissac by claiming, “Animals are not simply negotiating social situations, but are knowingly repeating certain actions for physical or emotional rewards, a process that, to me at least, seems to have important features in common with human performance.”16 Also responding to Bouissac, Williams acknowledges that sometimes anthropomorphized narratives are constructed for biologically patterned behaviors, but he asserts that the model does not account for moments of unpredictability which do occur, and he further questions whether humans even possess “the (animal) eye” necessary to perceive the exchange between animal and human in communication during performance.17 Williams’ resistance to thinking of animal behaviors as mere knee-jerk reflexes suggests that there is more going on for non-human performers than rote repetition of activities. Finally, Cary Wolfe also argues that viewing animal activity as mere reflex presents only a partial picture. He writes, “In the absence of language, we are told, animals remain locked within a universe of more or less automated ‘reactions,’ a set of preprogrammed and instinctive routines and subroutines, so that they are really more like machines than people, more like objects than subjects.”18 With this, Wolfe points out that referring to animal behavior as automatic equates the beings with mindless machines, which share little in common with humans. Or do they? Dolphin trainer Richard O’Barry writes that dolphins trained to do a theme park show “did it automatically,” as did the trainers: “If you thought animals were machines, this show would do nothing to dissuade you. But if the dolphins were machines, so

16 Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1996), 200. 17 Williams, “Right Horse,” 36. 18 Cary Wolfe, Introduction, Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xvi.

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was [the trainer] [. . .] I was a trained animal as much as they were.”19 O’Barry was responding to cues in performance as expected, doing so for the reward of applause and a paycheck just as the animals were behaving as trained for treats. Cast members in lengthy theatrical runs often comment they were merely going through the motions unless an exceptional audience prompted them to do otherwise. In writing about early nineteenth century melodramas, Michael Dobson claims, “The characters are every bit as mechanized as the scenery, the adult human actors as much engaged in obediently repeating pre-programmed tricks as any performing dog.”20 This is not the kind of mutuality spectators appreciate in performers, though. Performance scholars and theorists participating in this debate take their lead from scientists. Cognitive ethologists are scientific researchers who study animal minds and many, like Mark Bekoff, strenuously reject the notion that all animals are automatons. Like Bekoff and Carlson, I strive to see the similarities between humans and animals, beginning with the assumption that likenesses outnumber and outweigh differences. I concur with Williams and Wolfe that dismissal of animal activity as mere reflex ignores the sophistication of the animal performers. Analysis of performances involving both animals and humans demonstrates that they are particularly complicated events, and as they are presented “live,” always include some spontaneous elements that cannot be accounted for ahead of time. Some observable responses do indeed appear to be programmed behaviors in which animals and humans react to specific stimuli and provide cues for each other while expecting rehearsed responses. Stating that animal performance is merely automated, though, mistakenly assumes that the human consistently provides the animal with the same cues in the same ways in each performance. Alterations in human performance, which cannot be avoided, require a certain amount of flexibility and capacity for improvisation from the animal responding to the human. Without this, the show could not go on. Anyone witnessing a mistake made by an animal in performance views improvisational activity. Improvisation can be difficult to detect when an animal correctly executes an action even when a human’s cue is 19

Richard O’Barry and Keith Coulbourn, Behind the Dolphin Smile (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999), 106, 118. 20 Michael Dobson, “A Dog at All Things: The Transformation of the Onstage Canine, 1550–1850,” Performance Research 5.2 (2000): 123.

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inconsistent, or when an animal simply carries out a command differently than before. Yet, as Desmond points out, acknowledging that animals possess a capacity for improvisatory use of learned actions would be to grant “an agency in the process which is now limited to choosing or not choosing to fulfill a particular bodily motion.”21 Agency is typically reserved for humans, the creators of the contextual frames in which the animal performers appear. Attributing that kind of agency to animals would weaken notions of automatic response and place animals squarely beside human performers. In considering the scholarship mentioned here, I am led to question the necessity of self-consciousness in performers and their ability to make choices. While I consider most animals typically seen in performances—namely, dogs, horses, and marine mammals—as conscious of their own behaviors, I do not perceive them as making choices to participate in the performances. Obviously, they may be coerced, manipulated, forced into the actions they exhibit. How the human performers subject and manipulate the docile animal bodies becomes the core of the performance event. Being compelled to perform is not choosing to perform. Being coerced, in which an alleged choice exists between complying or being punished, is still not choosing to perform. I do not see choice, which for me implies at least a minimal degree of free will, as a requisite for performance; however, it is necessary for agency. Like the Indians de Certeau mentions, animal performers are able to channel energy from what little free will they have into potentially subversive acts. They may not consciously choose to perform, but they can choose when and how to exert agency within a performance. To apply this theory to individual animals, I now turn to horseracing and present examples of agency being attributed to specific thoroughbreds. I explore how our interpretations of horses’ behaviors depict them as human-like characters. Case Study: Thoroughbred Horses When 2006 Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro injured his right hind leg just moments after the Preakness Stakes began, crushing all Triple Crown hopes and ending the colt’s racing career, he became a larger-

21

Desmond, Staging Tourism, 214.

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than-life character in a dramatic tale, a survivor fighting the odds with bravery and alacrity, until his death eight months later in January 2007. Fans cried in the grandstand at the Preakness, and “mountains of gifts” including food, flowers, cards, and statues of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals to Roman Catholics, arrived at the hospital where Barbaro was housed.22 How is public perception of thoroughbreds produced so that such reactions are elicited? Most of the ways in which racing thoroughbreds are treated in public and the manner they are spoken of shows reverence on the part of the humans for the horses around which they revolve. While the American horse racing industry does not formally worship the thoroughbred, the animal is sometimes elevated to the status of a human athlete. When the Associated Press selected the top hundred athletes of the twentieth century, Secretariat got enough votes to make the list, coming in at number 81.23 Most voters apparently did not consider horses in thinking about athletes, for only this would account for the omissions of champions Man O’ War and Seattle Slew. Indeed, a quick glance at the dictionary definition of athlete specifies that it be a “person” who is trained to compete in feats of strength and stamina.24 Steve Wilstein points out that those who argue against a horse being an athlete “say that it (not a he or a she) does not aspire to be a champion, does not consciously train to win and break records. A racehorse, not being human, therefore lacks the essential qualities of the athlete to achieve something noble of body and spirit. All the beast does is carry out its genetic imperative: It is bred and born to run.”25 The portrayal of racehorses as protagonists relies on more than a genetic imperative, though. The construction of thoroughbred protagonists resembles the creation of fictional cartoon characters more than actual living horses because individual dispositions and backgrounds are emphasized. Descriptions of 2004 Kentucky Derby winner Smarty Jones read more like those of, say, Mickey Mouse than a workhorse on a Midwest farm because of details about the thoroughbred’s preferences, habits, and attitudes. Eight Belles was deemed a tragic heroine when the filly finished in second place at the 2008 Kentucky Derby, only to be euthanized on the track

22 “Barbaro Even Getting Religious Ornaments,” MSNBC, http://msnbc.msn.com/ id/12976934/. 23 Wilstein, “Smarty Jones.” 24 The Random House Collegiate Dictionary, revised ed. 1994, s.v. “Athlete.” 25 Wilstein, “Smarty Jones.”

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because of two broken ankles. When the personalities of animals are discussed, one horse becomes a hero while another is an underachiever who lacks confidence; one overcomes a severe injury to race again, another works best under pressure. I use the word “personalities” to draw attention to how we routinely anthropomorphize the animals we describe. Are we attempting to make the racehorses more human so that people will identify with them—and in identifying, plunk down $10 on the #3 horse to win? I attend to what humans say about horses in an effort to examine how such speech acts work to construct the perceived consciousness of the animals, shaping human consciousness in the process. I begin with the equine protagonist’s partner in the race narrative: the jockey. Hall of Fame rider Pat Day has remarked, “In just about any other sport—football, baseball, basketball, golf—the individual player is solely responsible for his own job performance. In this sport, the horse dictates our job performance about 99 percent of the time.”26 This is not to assign sole responsibility for a win or loss to the horse; rather, Day is pointing out that the jockey must be able to adjust to the horse in order to produce the best ride. In other words, the job of the jockey is to respond to the horse’s actions. Thus, the agency exerted by the rider depends on the agency exerted by the thoroughbred. Jockey Gary Stevens has been said to use the legendary Willie Shoemaker’s philosophy on riding to win: “Get him out of the gate, then get out of his way.”27 The behaviors exhibited by the animals determine how the jockey uses timing, tactics, and strength to guide the horse through a field of other horse-rider teams; the communication must go both ways. Communication is essential as a jockey must be able to understand what a horse’s capabilities are, what energy is in reserve, and what may already be spent. The jockey communicates what is needed from the horse in every stage of the race through the use of the whip and reins. During a race, it is easy for spectators to see jockeys pumping their arms with reins in hand and whipping the horses as ways of making the animals go faster. “Switching sticks,” a method used by some riders, is alternating the whip between hands, almost juggling the reins and whip. These actions are often referred to as a rider “asking” the horse

26

Steve Bailey, “Vintage Athletes,” Keeneland 19.2, April 2004, 8. 129th Preakness Stakes, hosted by Tom Hammond and Charlsie Cantey, National Broadcasting Company, 15 May 2004. 27

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to accelerate, implying that the animal cannot be forced to do anything against its will. This language suggests the horse possesses agency and can choose to respond by running faster or ignoring the prompt. Those in the racing industry view striking a running horse as a motivational tactic, not necessarily a show of dominance by the human over the horse. Nan Mooney explains, When on the move, horses instinctively give in to dominance far more readily than when they’re standing still. If they begin to wander during a race, a sharp tap from a rider’s whip can instantly refocus them. Hitting a horse is a practiced skill, reliant on timing and placement rather than power. Jockeys synchronize their strokes as precisely as a musician following a score, each tap delivered in time with the horse’s stride. Strict rules dictate how often a rider can hit a horse, and contact is limited to the heavily muscled shoulders and backside.28

But even the most experienced jockeys break the rules, and the consequences can be deadly. Russell Baze, who has won more races than any other jockey in thoroughbred racing history, was suspended and fined in August 2007 for whipping an injured horse in a race. The horse, Imperial Eyes, responded to the jockey’s command by running faster, aggravating the injury and causing such distress that he had to be euthanized after the race.29 So humans have imposed limits on how they can communicate with racehorses during a race. Using a whip is intending to redirect a horse’s display of agency. It is a show of dominance because a command is given; hitting another being should not be considered “asking.” This physical force is sometimes necessary to counter the animals’ decisions. Even the proper use of the jockey’s instruments to communicate may not always be well-received by the horse. Mooney writes of non-responsive horses like May’s Regal Girl: “Her rider tapped at her right flank with the whip, trying to get her to move inward, but she ignored all messages from the outside world . . . She was an independent thinker.”30 Such independence is occasionally a sign of greatness as “[h]orse trainers commonly observe that some horses feel pride. Secretariat, who won the Kentucky Derby in 1973, was said to be proud. As evidence

28 Nan Mooney, My Racing Heart: The Passionate World of Thoroughbreds and the Track (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2002), 133. 29 “Winningest Jockey Baze Fined, Suspended for Whipping Injured Horse,” ESPN, 26 August 2007, http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/horse/news/story?id=2992449. 30 Mooney, My Racing Heart, 201.

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it was noted by trainers and jockeys that he refused to run unless he was allowed to run the race his way—to use his burst of speed early or late in a race, as he chose—despite the fact that he was usually a docile, biddable horse.”31 Of a thoroughbred racing in the 1950s, Mooney notes, “If a jockey tried to slow him down a bit to conserve speed for the finish, Dr. Fager [the mount] yanked the reins right out of the rider’s hands. He knew what to do and nobody could tell him otherwise.”32 More recently, in the losing effort to obtain the Triple Crown at the 2004 Belmont Stakes, jockey Stewart Elliott said that his horse Smarty Jones “dragged” him to the lead and “didn’t settle.”33 In other words, the thoroughbred’s independent thinking and exertion of agency—in refusing to respond to the jockey’s communication in the desired manner—cost them the race, just as Secretariat’s independence helped win races. There may be less tangible ways the jockey and horse communicate that cannot be detected by viewers. Those outside racing put the rider-horse relationship in terms that extend beyond the physical call and response. Director of equestrian theatre group, Théâtre Zingaro, Bartabas has said of working closely with horses, “At that stage, the relationship is no longer physical but psychic; one thinks of a movement and the horse does it.”34 Acclaimed horse trainer Vicki Hearne wrote of equestrian jumping: When the threshold of art has been crossed, then the wonderful obedience and supple submission of the horse, the joy of the horse’s submission, are like the intensely accurate responsiveness of a great performer to a good audience [. . .] It is, as Podhajsky says, as though the rider thinks and the horse executes the thought, without mediation or any sort of cuing; but it is also the other way around on the back of a great horse—it is as though the horse thinks and the rider creates, or becomes, a space and direction for the execution of the horse’s thoughts.35

These descriptions present the horse as independent agent, but rebellion or disobedience from the horse is not the evidence. Rather, the

31 Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing, 1995), 119. 32 Mooney, My Racing Heart, 66. 33 136th Belmont Stakes, hosted by Tom Hammond and Charlsie Cantey, National Broadcasting Company, 5 June 2004. 34 Qtd. in Williams, “The Right Horse,” 32. 35 Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 163.

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evidence presented is the perspective of the human partner to the horse, and the person’s reception could be considered as instinctive as the horse’s response in these cases. Temple Grandin writes, “Riding becomes instinctual after a while; a good rider and his horse are a team. It’s not a one-way relationship, either; it’s not just the human relating to the horse and telling him what to do. Horses are super-sensitive to their riders and are constantly responding to the riders’ needs even without being asked.”36 Grandin refers to a “good” rider, but the team she describes seems to rely heavily on a “good” horse. Jockey Shane Sellers speaks of the symbiosis experienced when he rides: “becoming not two, but one. You and the horse becoming one.”37 In such a relationship, it would be challenging to determine precisely who is exercising agency, or calling the shots. While the best jockeys are among the highest paid athletes in the world, most acknowledge, as reflected in Pat Day’s previously quoted comment, that they are one half of a partnership and the horse cannot be ignored. Jockeys are often heard remarking that they realized at some point in a race they had “some horse left”; it takes the energies of both to reach the finish. Jockey Mike Smith’s comments regarding his ride on Lion Heart in the 2004 Kentucky Derby show his awareness of his partner’s experience and reinforce that it was a joint effort. Smith noted the horse’s startled reaction to the screams of the crowd when he “jumped on the bridle,” but also that “he ran hard;” despite the effort, though, “We got beat.”38 Gary Stevens speaks of the horses he rides and competes against in terms similar to those used by athletes about their peers in other sports. Before the Preakness Stakes, Stevens said of Smarty Jones, “I’ve got a lot of respect for him,” and of his own ride, Rock Hard Ten, he remarked the horse is “lacking in education,” or experience.39 Jockey Edgar Prado received praise for halting Barbaro soon after the career-ending injury and shared credit with the horse: “I think he figured out right away something was wrong. Instead of fighting me, he tried to help himself, too. It was a combination of both of us. He’s very athletic. He was like telling me, ‘Come on, help me out

36 Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation (New York: Harcourt, 2005), 6. 37 Jockey, dir. Kate Davis, HBO, 2004. 38 130th Kentucky Derby, hosted by Tom Hammond and Charlsie Cantey, National Broadcasting Company, 1 May 2004. 39 Preakness.

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here.’”40 This represents an extreme example of an unexpected scenario that required both rider and horse to improvise. As each human-animal team scripts its own version of the race before and after it occurs, improvisation is obviously necessary as the plans of teams will undoubtedly be in conflict with each other. Improvisational skills are especially crucial for horse and jockey, who must adjust to weather, track conditions, and the actions of other horse-jockey teams. This communication exchange, when one member of the team expresses to the other what may be the preferred improvisatory course of action, is worth considering to gain a fuller picture of animal consciousness. The jockey’s choice of action is based on strategy, and the horse either follows the lead or not. Resistance on the horse’s part only adds to the dramatic conflict already present in the race and demonstrates either agency or a deficit in capability. It is clear that both members of the interspecies team are called on to improvise in the running of a race. Referring to actions and reactions of the horse as evidence of capacity for improvisation marks a move I make away from some theorists of improvisation. Keith Johnstone, Jerzy Grotowski, Viola Spolin, Anthony Frost, and Ralph Yarrow all explicitly or implicitly state their concepts of improvisation are based on human resources and models, yet much of what they write about improvisation is also applicable to animals. In Improvisation in Drama, a survey of various theories and strategies covering improvisation in a range of performance settings, Frost and Yarrow use “response” repeatedly to define improvisation: Improvisation is physical response, including the verbal. It is immediate and organic articulation; not just response, but a paradigm for the way humans reflect (or create) what happens. Where improvisation is most effective, most spontaneous, least ‘blocked’ by taboo, habit or shyness, it comes close to a condition of integration with the environment or context.41

Improvisation is a series of responses among participants, and response can create something new. In order to respond to co-performers and the environment, one must be in a heightened state of awareness. In

40

“Prado Still Emotional over Barbaro Injury,” MSNBC, http://msnbc.msn.com/ id/12901493/. 41 Anthony Frost and Ralph Yarrow, Improvisation in Drama (London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1990), 2.

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Keith Johnstone’s performance group Theatre Machine, the method of working required that all actors “be highly sensitive to each other and to what is happening, totally ‘present’ and alert, prepared to support each other and not ‘block’.”42 Horse and rider relationships often include descriptions of partners being “alert” and “sensitive” to one another. Also generally required of improvisational performers is an awareness of surroundings and the ability to adapt to unexpected discoveries. Frost and Yarrow write, “Improvisation is about order, and about adaptation, and about truthfully responding to changing circumstances, and about generating meaning out of contextual accidents.” 43 This seems to precisely describe the journey of the thoroughbred team through the race event. Johnstone emphasizes the teamwork required for effective improvisation to occur: “I call anything that an actor does an ‘offer.’ Each offer can either be accepted, or blocked. [. . .] A block is anything that prevents the action from developing, or that wipes out your partner’s premise. If it develops the action, it isn’t a block. [. . .] Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks prearranged. This is because they accept all offers made.”44 Every rider desires a horse that improvises by readily accepting the kind of offers Johnstone describes. The successful racing team is one in which the partners do not block suggestions or commands; they may even anticipate each other and respond appropriately as or before the offer is made, so that the action of competing together develops without hesitation. In some cases, improvising is not necessarily exercising agency. As an “immediate and organic articulation,” an improvised act could be an automatic response of the kind that Schechner and Bouissac describe.45 An improvised reaction may be reflexive, an act of instinct that is not based on conscious choice; but jockeys are as likely to exhibit this kind of improvisation as horses are. Horses are not given free reign in race events because that would wrest control from humans. In thoroughbred races, alterations in plans and behaviors may occur, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. Should a horse attempt to improvise in a way that differs radically from the jockey’s plans, the human typically regains control. Thoroughbreds are not encouraged

42

Ibid., 58. Ibid., 3. 44 Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1992), 97, 99. 45 Frost & Yarrow, Improvisation, 2. 43

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to act independently; when they do so, it is usually noted by people as problematic and exceptional. To permit a horse to exercise the improvisatory agency it is capable of, would be to accept the unpredictable. People typically resist working with unpredictable teammates because it requires much more work to devise an array of planned responses ready for whatever the animal presents than to rehearse one cue and one response with a predictable, reliable partner. Avoiding potential instability allows humans to gain confidence in their own performances. Animal Awareness One wonders if animals may view humans as the unpredictable element in the racing team. What animals are aware of is the subject of much research and speculation. Interpretations concerning consciousness are modes of constructing the animals, and they inform how behavior gets read as agency. Such claims also reveal something about the awareness of humans observing the animals. Here is how some people have described horse Smarty Jones: Writer Steve Wilstein: “He displays a sense of the moment . . . Ears pricked up, eyes alert, he plays to the crowd.”46 Television Commentator Tom Hammond: “He knows he’s the center of attention.”47 Television Commentator Charlsie Cantey: “He’s thriving on all this.”48 Trainer John Servis: “He wants to win.”49

Of these four comments, only the first includes an explanation of what the horse is displaying to elicit the speaker to describe the animal as aware of what is going on around him. There is the assumption on the part of all the speakers that this particular animal is self-aware and conscious in ways very similar to humans. Not restricting his comments to a specific individual, Gary Stevens asserts that, in general, horses “know” when they win a race and they “thrive” on it.50 As a Hall of Fame jockey, Stevens has devoted a lifetime to understanding horses and communicating with them, so his opinion would seem credible, 46

Wilstein, “Smarty Jones.” Belmont. 48 Ibid. 49 Derby. 50 The True Story of Seabiscuit, writ. and dir. Martin Gillam, narr. William H. Macy, Arts and Entertainment Network, 23 February 2004. 47

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yet it is no doubt based on his own observations and experiences with horses, and might therefore be dismissed by some as anecdotal. Yet more and more scientists who also devote their lives to understanding animals, albeit in vastly different ways than jockeys, are presenting similar conclusions based on research in the laboratory and field. As Akira Lippit points out, the tradition has long been that animals “are held to be neither nonconscious likes stones or plants, nor self-conscious like humans.”51 But dissenting voices are growing louder. For example, George Page insists that those who doubt consciousness in animals must account for how it appears, without benefit of evolutionary process, in human beings like a bolt of lightning.52 Scientist Mark Bekoff discusses different levels of consciousness: awareness of surroundings, feeling sensations, and knowledge of identity. He cautiously acknowledges the usefulness of anecdotes and anthropomorphism to cognitive ethological approaches.53 Philosopher Thomas Nagel’s landmark essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” argues that it is like something to be that organism, and that just because we cannot get inside the bat’s mind does not justify dismissing its experiences as less rich than our own.54 Still, people continue to attempt to understand the minds of animals in human terms, the only ones we know. Researchers studying gorillas who use American Sign Language claim that self-awareness is not limited to humans as gorillas have expressed cognitive correlates of self-awareness like embarrassment, use of personal pronouns, humor, deception, and references to their own emotional states.55 Drawing these connections between animals and humans is the standard method for making sense of animal behavior; findings are translated into the simplistic binary of them being like or unlike us. Tom Hammond asks, “Who do you think is more nervous: Stewart Elliott or Smarty Jones?”

51 Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 6. 52 George Page, Inside the Animal Mind: A Groundbreaking Exploration of Animal Intelligence (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 214. 53 Mark Bekoff, Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 88. 54 Ralph R. Acampora, “Bodily Being and Animal World: Toward a Somatology of Cross-Species Community,” Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, ed. H. Peter Steeves (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 118. 55 Francine Patterson and Wendy Gordon, “The Case for the Personhood of Gorillas,” Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, ed. Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger, and Brenda Peterson. (New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1998), 132–41.

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because using the same terms for jockey and horse calls attention to the two species sharing an important moment.56 What may also be falsely inferred, however, is that the two share the same experiences of the moment. Sociologists Arnold Arluke and Clinton R. Sanders argue, “It would seem reasonable, then, to acknowledge that human-animal interaction can have a mutuality based on the animal’s self-awareness and ability to, at least at some rudimentary level, empathically experience the perspective of coactors.”57 In this statement may be found a belief shared by those responsible for the remarks about Smarty Jones, and a reason why racehorses are so often characterized by those who work with them and spectators in ways usually reserved to describe humans. It is not uncommon for people to imagine they can understand the thought processes of lower animals; indeed, this is the root of anthropomorphism. A character in J. M. Coetzee’s book The Lives of Animals, novelist and animal rights activist Elizabeth Costello, asserts, “If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.”58 It is this thinking our way into the existence of animals, in this case thoroughbreds, that makes the roles of trainer and jockey even possible, and that allows horses to be constructed as protagonists. Are they actually conscious of any of this as it occurs? Does a breed “born to run” know when a race is won? Evidenced by watching packs of wild horses running together, these animals are genetically programmed to race, instinctively competing against others like them. While it is likely that a thoroughbred knows it beat the field of horses in a race, the concept of winning is a human construct that involves more than running the fastest. When people assert that racers know that they win, there is the implication that horses understand the significance of the win to human culture. Such awareness may simply indicate that the horse picks up on the coactors’ behavior. The Clever Hans phenomenon is worth reflecting on here. In 1904, William von Osten claimed to have trained a horse, Clever Hans, to

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Belmont. Arnold Arluke and Clinton R. Sanders, Regarding Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 50. 58 J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, The University Center for Human Values, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 35. 57

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answer questions of math, music, history, and geography correctly. Upon investigation, it was discovered that von Osten was unconsciously cueing Clever Hans, so that the horse could tell that the teacher’s tension subsided somewhat when the right number of hoof taps had been reached.59 While it was surely disappointing to discover that there was, after all, no evidence that the horse could add two and two to get four or even grasp the concept of mathematics, there is no more famous example of interspecies communication. Reading human behavior was the skill Clever Hans had developed, and he was rewarded with sugar cubes when he responded to the teacher’s behavior appropriately. A slightly less famous example is an anecdote of my own. When training my dog Molly to walk in the heel position, I would take a few steps with her by my side while saying aloud the command, “Heel,” and then turn, and repeat the same maneuver. While I was repeating “Heel” numerous times each trip, I was also saying, “Turn around” each time we changed directions. Much to my surprise, after flawless practice sessions of this kind, Molly refused to obey the heel command when going for walks. One day, when we went outside to find it was raining and I decided to return home immediately, I inadvertently realized that she obeyed “Turn around” perfectly. All those training sessions resulted in my teaching her something I had no intention to convey. Years later, I can get her to turn around on a dime, but the concept of “heel” is lost. Therefore, I suggest that what humans read in a thoroughbred’s behavior as “knowing” or “thriving” in a win, may be a response to human cues that actually reflects something entirely different. What must not be overlooked is the complexity of these animals, and the convoluted perspective produced when we attempt to simplify them by either dismissing them as machine-like or assuming they respond like humans. Significant differences in consciousness surely exist between species, but this does not preclude animal agency.

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Williams, “The Right Horse,” 32–33.

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Sullivan, who denies thoroughbreds their positions as protagonists, expresses an understanding of their complexity at the same time he fails to grasp their essential difference from humans: There is an innocence to these creatures; they are children, after all. Yet their pride is undeniable, too: they seem to know that the whole affair, the hundreds of millions changing hands every year, the roaring crowds, the pageantry, the tears, are about them, and are nothing without their power. Yet their power is ambiguous, for they have already accepted the bit and the bridle.60

Describing racehorses as simultaneously innocent, childlike, proud, powerful, and knowing, Sullivan depicts them as complex multi-faceted individuals. Yet he insists that they willingly “accept” human domination, intentionally empowering the other species through their actions. If they actually did voluntarily submit to humans, it would be an act of agency to surrender their freedom, albeit a final act. While it is hard for me to believe that powerful thoroughbreds eagerly submit to human trainers and riders, it does not seem worthwhile to argue. As hazy as the matter of animal consciousness is, what is “undeniable,” I do argue, is that we simply cannot know with certainty what they know. It is the uncertainty that produces the fiction, though. Perhaps anyone questioning animal agency and awareness should be directed to the website for 2005 Preakness and Belmont Stakes’ winner, Afleet Alex. Click on “Alex’s Diary” to read entries written in first “person” by the horse himself, reflecting on his wins, losses, and race preparations. After his Preakness win, the diary passage reads, “I am so happy! I raced the other day and it was something else [. . .] I was determined to win, the crowd was screaming my name [. . .] We were coming around the turn, [Jockey] Jeremy [Rose] told me to go (I love that part) and off I went. [. . .] Get out of my way, I’m taking Jeremy home . . . no one will stop me this time!”61 Not only is Alex presented as cognizant of what it means to win, he is apparently motivated to do so by the crowd and the jockey, enjoying every moment of the race. Born to run, Alex views the finish line as “home” and is glad to follow his jockey’s commands. Exercising agency in this case is not a problem because Alex shares the same

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Sullivan, “Horseman,” 47. “Awe-Inspiring Afleet Alex,” http://www.afleetalex.com/diary.html.

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goals as his teammate. Of course, this anthropomorphized character presented as Afleet Alex exemplifies the thoroughbred that Sullivan describes. He is depicted as childish, proud, knowing, and submissive. It is a peculiar combination of characteristics, especially for a celebrity athlete. This depiction does as much to undermine the power of the thoroughbred as a sporting event in which a small human provokes a horse to run with a stick. I have asserted here that human descriptions of horses’ behaviors suggest that animals’ awareness determines how they exert agency. In so many situations involving animals performing, such as a thoroughbred race, we have to rely almost entirely on what the human partner says about the animal’s actions in order to assess its capacity for agency. Due to differing interpretations of animal behaviors, this can be problematic and raises an important issue brought forth in another context by Jacques Derrida. He has examined Lacan’s claim that animals cannot erase their own tracks; they cannot pretend to pretend. Derrida’s intricate analysis comes to a head when he finally asks “whether what calls itself human has the right to rigorously attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses the animal.”62 While both Derrida and I introduce the question of authority late, it seems to me that it may actually be the best—and perhaps essential—first question to ask in future considerations of agency in animals.

62 Jacques Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded,” Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 112.

CONSUMING TIMOTHY TREADWELL: REDEFINING NONHUMAN AGENCY IN LIGHT OF HERZOG’S GRIZZLY MAN David Lulka The ferocity of grizzlies was established early in Euroamerican history, when Lewis and Clark noted that “this anamall [sic] is said more frequently to attack a man on meeting with him, than to flee from him.”1 And despite noting the tendency of grizzlies to avoid humans, the explorers went on to state that, “these bear are a most tremendous animal; it seems that the hand of providence has been most wonderfully in our favor with rispect [sic] to them, or some of us would long since have fallen a sacrifice to their farosity [sic].”2 In recounting the demise of Timothy Treadwell, director Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man reaffirms this antagonistic perception. Grizzly Man effectively contrasts Herzog’s narrative to Treadwell’s own documentary videos, thereby utilizing Treadwell and Herzog as theoretical counterpoints within this tragic tale, wherein each man articulates a starkly different conception of grizzly bears, only in the end to reconfirm traditional notions of the animal by virtue of Treadwell’s seemingly predestined death. For Treadwell, grizzlies are animals amenable to human interaction; for Herzog, grizzlies are members of a species that can inflict considerable injury upon a person. From the outset of the film, we know that Treadwell was mistaken in his estimations, for we are informed that Treadwell (and girlfriend Amie Huguenard) died at the hands of a grizzly, eaten alive in an undoubtedly painful and violent fashion. What remains to be seen, however, is whether Herzog’s conception of grizzlies is any more accurate than Treadwell’s. Initially, this uncertainty appears nonsensical, for the course of real events speaks otherwise. Nonetheless, in looking at the philosophical foundations that undergird Herzog’s representation of grizzlies, the accuracy of Herzog’s portrayal becomes less evident. Herzog’s narrative reiterates some of the

1 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, The Journals of Lewis and Clark (New York: Viking Press, 1989), 104. 2 Lewis and Clark, 449.

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most fundamental aspects of modernism, a perspective that established the sharp division between humans and nonhumans in contemporary society. According to Harvey, “modernity can have no respect even for its past, let alone that of any premodern social order.”3 This includes premodern conceptions of animals, which often articulated animal agency in profusion.4 In its extreme forms, modernism completely rejected the notion of animal agency in favor of rigid mechanical processes.5 Although Herzog does not reject the presence of animal agency (for the magnitude of events depicted in Grizzly Man suggests otherwise), he remains trapped by modernism. Herzog’s depiction of animal agency is reductionist in spite of the grand spiral of events in Grizzly Man, for while brute force may be fairly characterized as agency, it is still an impoverished form of agency, one that does not resonate with the nuanced behaviors used to substantiate human agency. Instead, Herzog uses the purported ferocity and power of grizzlies to further distinguish animals from humans. The incredible strength of grizzlies makes it all too easy to slip into this theoretical mistake, even though a difference in degree does not amount to a difference in kind. With this basic problem in mind, this chapter revisits Grizzly Man in order to reassess and redefine notions of animal agency. Space, with its multiple meanings, is central to this refiguration of agency. On the one hand, space may be characterized as a cultural metaphor in which proximity and distance imply the degree of similarity (or lack thereof ) between humans and other animals. Conversely, space also refers to the landscapes that humans and other animals inhabit. In truth, these two conceptions of space are interrelated, for the manner in which nonhumans engage with landscapes establishes opportunities for perceiving similarities and rethinking the connection between humanity and animality.6

3

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 11. Robert E. Beider, Bear (London: Reaktion Books, 2005). 5 Leonora Cohen Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). 6 Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel, eds., Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands (London: Verso, 1998); Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, eds., Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations (London: Routledge, 2000); John Knight, ed., Animals in Person (Berg: Oxford, 2005). 4

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To begin, the next section presents a brief examination of Treadwell’s and Herzog’s respective conceptions of grizzlies. While Treadwell is driven by multiple forces to diminish the space that separates him from grizzlies, Herzog seeks to re-establish a clear division between the species and enlarge the gulf between humans and other animals. Finding each of these conceptions to be inadequate, the discussion then borrows from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to provide a more substantial and subtle conception of animal agency, one that may be characterized by spatial concatenations that neither privilege proximity nor valorize distance. These newly-theorized spatial geometries establish an alternate trajectory for relating to other animals without eliminating distinctions between species. Treadwell and Herzog Grizzly Man functions as a dialogue regarding the nature of bears, wherein Herzog and Treadwell, though distant from each other in time and space, espouse their divergent philosophies. Although a finely crafted film, this brief summation of Grizzly Man is too generous, for Herzog was able to carve Treadwell’s identity (like a totem) into a figure that justified his own modern perceptions of man and beast. To his benefit, Herzog got the final word since he arrived last upon the scene in Alaska. By no fault of his own, Herzog was forced to reconstruct Treadwell through the estimations of others and Treadwell’s own videography. Treadwell’s own documentation of events undoubtedly lends credibility to Herzog’s final conclusions, since Treadwell is permitted to speak for himself, free from coercion. Nevertheless, whether by intent or folly, Treadwell’s identity is caricatured in Grizzly Man, a result which has ramifications for prevailing conceptions of grizzly bears. Given tidbits of information about Treadwell, it is apparent that his relationship with grizzly bears and contemporary American society was complex. With regard to the latter, we know from Herzog that Treadwell abused drugs earlier in life, drifted to California with the intent of becoming an actor, and ultimately failed in these aspirations. Herzog notes these shortcomings, implicitly suggesting that Treadwell was disaffected with society, leading him to “commune” with children, grizzlies, and other marginalized groups living within the North American landscape. Predicated upon failure and weakness, this estimation of Treadwell unfortunately denigrates the human-nonhuman

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relationships he formed and homogenizes the cause of their origins by focusing upon economic conditions. To the contrary, Treadwell had other talents that empowered him, namely a very contemporary desire to know about grizzlies as a distinct species, an approach that might be termed scientific. According to Doug and Andrea Peacock, Treadwell possessed considerable knowledge about grizzlies that was worthy of scientific note.7 Much of his knowledge was based upon observation that necessarily brought Treadwell close to grizzlies. Regardless of this fact, Herzog disparaged Treadwell’s unusual methods, likely due in part to modernity’s distinction between scientific and lay knowledge.8 To these influences must be added Treadwell’s certain knowledge of indigenous perceptions of grizzlies. In Grizzly Man, Marnie Gaude notes that Treadwell had a spiritual connection to bears, an observation that suggests Treadwell appropriated notions of kinship found in native communities. Thus, in speaking of his self-named “Grizzly Sanctuary,” Treadwell asserted that “My devotion to its inhabitants grew with each passing day.”9 To be clear, Treadwell’s devotional attitude did not require adherence to a specific heritage for, as Torgovnick notes, “Our culture’s generalized notion of the primitive is by nature and in effect inexact and composite: it conforms to no single social or geographical entity, and, indeed, habitually and sometimes willfully confuses the attributes of different societies.”10 How these disparate forces merged within Treadwell is uncertain, but it is unlikely that one factor acted to the exclusion of the others. Rather, these influences probably acted in a synergistic fashion to produce the multifaceted-figure known as Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell was a hybrid scattered over time and space. What unifies these pre/post/ modern forces is that they brought Treadwell into closer proximity to grizzlies, a situation that Herzog could not fathom. Treadwell’s compaction of space is evident at several points during Grizzly Man. He approaches grizzlies time and again, conversing with them in a stern or friendly demeanor, and he violates regulations

7 Doug Peacock and Andrea Peacock, The Essential Grizzly (Guilford: Lyons Press, 2006). 8 Peter Dickens, Reconstructing Nature: Alienation, Emancipation, and the Division of Labour (London: Routledge, 1996). 9 Timothy Treadwell and Jewel Palovak, Among Grizzlies (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 30. 10 Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990), 22.

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established by Alaskan wildlife authorities, who sought to limit physical access to grizzlies. Treadwell described himself as a warrior working to save the grizzlies of Alaska, and, in some cases, this energy was directed against governmental authorities because wilderness regulations structured the landscape in a way that violated his sensibilities by creating distance where he thought there should be none. The best example of Treadwell’s proximity to grizzlies, however, occurs when he places his hand upon a pile of bear dung. The scientific import of scat may have initially drawn Treadwell’s attention (“science” and “shit” share the same Indo-European root), but his interest seems more intimate and reflective of premodern filiations.11 For instance, upon touching the feces, he notes that he “was inside of her” and refers to the bear as “my girl.” For him, bear feces is a means for a deeper connection with grizzlies. The excrement is where metaphor and materiality meet, as it is a physical means for getting inside a grizzly and gaining a better understanding of the animal’s inner essence. On a larger scale, living in the midst of the Alaskan milieu in close proximity to bears also had much to do with this “deeper” understanding, for he states in one of his letters (read by Gaude) that “I have to mutually mutate into a wild animal to handle the life I live out here.” Notions of interiority or embeddedness (within the body or within a habitat) are central to understanding these bonds. In actuality, these internal and external domains are related since the contents of scat are remnants of the wider environment. In his autobiography, Treadwell completes this merger among species by stating, “I decided to behave like the bears, and dropped to all fours. I was transforming, going through a metamorphosis;” later, environmental circumstances led Treadwell to summon internally “the power of the grizzly within me.”12 These sentiments meld with Torgovnick’s notion of “the primitive as a modern and postmodern obsession, as a bedrock or gut issue.”13 Treadwell eventually feels knowledgeable enough to state in Grizzly Man that “I know the language of the bear.” Treadwell cannot be criticized for diminishing the significance of animal agency, for he is willing to grant grizzlies as much agency as humans. Yet, in part, this is exactly the problem. As indicated by his “conversations” with grizzlies and his close proximity to them, he

11 12 13

Ralph A. Lewin, Merde (New York: Random House, 1999). Treadwell and Palovak, 25, 29. Torgovnick, 21.

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perceives grizzly agency to be similar to human agency. Whether this perspective is categorized as zoomorphism or anthropomorphism is largely irrelevant here, for both terms signal a coming-together. His perspective undoubtedly has benefits, as it acknowledges similarities between humans and nonhumans, yet, by blurring distinctions, Treadwell distorts and homogenizes the character of nonhuman agency. As Erica Fudge notes, anthropomorphism understates animal agency by constraining its boundaries, for it is predicated upon human parameters for measurement.14 Anthropomorphism is thus a double-edged sword, for it permits humans to bond with other animals, yet prevents the development of a more comprehensive understanding of animal agency, one that is receptive toward points of divergence from humanity. If Treadwell is driven to commune with grizzlies by his failings in the “postmodern” economy, his scientific curiosity, and his affinity with premodern perspectives, Herzog is compelled by the certitude of modernism to re-establish distance. Herzog’s stalwart modernism benefits from the ultimate failure of Treadwell’s experiment. The proof in Herzog’s pudding is Treadwell’s death, which enables Herzog’s narrative to form an inexorable arc that decisively reaffirms the modern stance. In short, Grizzly Man is a tale that was done before it was told. Although Herzog shares some of the same sympathies as Treadwell, for him there is a larger lesson to be learned in this tragic story, namely that man must be wary of sympathetic attitudes toward other species. Thusly, Herzog notes at the outset, “I discovered a film of human ecstasies and darkest turmoil. As if there was a desire in him to leave the confinements of his humanness and bond with the bears, Treadwell reached out seeking a primordial encounter. But in doing so, he crossed an invisible borderline.” From this, Grizzly Man gains its moral—Treadwell’s demise is not a voyeuristic thrill, but rather a depiction of the perils to be avoided by modern man. Validating the separation between human sympathies and logical action is a critical part of Herzog’s task. Whether figured as premodern or anthropomorphic, a humanistic approach toward animals fails in Herzog’s worldview because it does not conform to modern scientific understanding, and as such Treadwell’s experiment was not scientific, but rather an escapade of risk born of ignorance. The modern approach seeks an objective stance that is antithetical to empathy and the actions empathy inspires.

14

Erica Fudge, Animal (London, Reaktion Books, 2002).

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Despite the reasonableness of his words, Herzog is subject to many modern forces that impact his perception of nature and the animals that live within it. Chief among these, the medium of film exacerbates modernist tendencies. Since the early stages of film technology, movies explored exotic locales and drew strong cultural distinctions by stereotyping native peoples and their premodern practices.15 Presently, wildlife documentaries still accentuate the primal characteristics of animals by focusing heavily upon sexual behavior and killing rather than their social or cognitive capacities.16 Such movies are explicit cultural depictions of difference. Nonetheless, according to Cavell, cinematic technology makes the attribute of distance even more fundamental to film-making by virtue of the fact that, “The reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it; and a world I know, and see, but to which I am nevertheless not present (through no fault of my subjectivity), is a world past.”17 For Cavell, paintings do not produce the same effect because the real world recedes as a painting develops, thereby providing no benchmark for feeling distance. This furtive perspective is well-suited to modern life, wherein urbanites become accustomed to anonymity, and whereby, “Our condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self.”18 As Rothman adds, “It feels natural to us because we have already become displaced from our natural habitation within the world.”19 To the extent that modern documentaries are associated with realism, Herzog’s Grizzly Man verifies Cavell’s perspective, for its truth appears self-evident. In consequence of such articulations, Jervis’s contention that, “The modern view of nature replaces continuity with dichotomy, community with distance, participation with manipulation” rings true.20 Grizzly Man is firmly embedded in this modern promulgation of distance and difference. Herzog creates distance in Grizzly Man by several means. The visual panoramas in Grizzly Man, which show vast stretches of

15 Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) 16 Ibid., 2006. 17 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 23. 18 Ibid., 102. 19 William Rothman, “Film, Modernity, Cavell,” in Cinema and Modernity, ed. Murray Pomerance (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2006), 322. 20 John Jervis, Transgressing the Modern (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 136.

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solitude, initially suggest a gap between humans and other animals. Additionally, Herzog’s narrative voice—disembodied, authoritative, and grand—characterizes nature as uncaring and unfeeling. For example, Herzog reiterates modern antipathies by stating that “Here I differ with Treadwell. He seemed to ignore the fact that in nature there are predators. I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.” The grizzly conjured up by Herzog is not simply a bear, but rather the Ursus arctos horribilis of the frontier, the one which Lewis and Clark observed years before on their westward journey, and through this narrative, Herzog re-substantiates the adversarial relationship between man and beast that legitimized the American conquest of nature many years ago. Herzog pushes this distance ever further, however, when he relives the critical moment in this tale—the death of Timothy Treadwell. Herzog dons headphones to listen to the fatal encounter between Treadwell, Huguenard, and a grizzly, and, in so doing, frustrates the viewer by not permitting the sounds to be heard, thus creating another opaque layer of distance. There can only be speculation about the exact parameters of the killings. The best guide, it turns out, is the reaction of Herzog himself, who seems rather repulsed by what he is hearing. That revulsion and incredulity, which is only magnified by the viewer’s incapacity to hear, is an approximation of the distance, the unfathomable abyss, that separates humans and other animals. To the degree that it is unheard, it is unspeakable. It is inhuman. Herzog reinforces the validity of his own modern perspective by accentuating Treadwell’s “irrationality” in several different ways. Herzog invalidates Treadwell’s concerns through the assessments of a wildlife biologist—“It’s a very healthy [grizzly] population”; a museum curator of native descent—“He tried to be a bear. He tried to act like a bear and for us on the island you don’t do that . . . To me it was the ultimate of disrespecting the bear and what the bear represents”; and helicopter pilot—“I think the only reason that Treadwell lasted as long in the game as he did was that the bears probably thought there was something wrong with him, like he was mentally retarded or something . . . He had lost sight of what was really going on.” Treadwell is thus undercut by modern science, indigenous knowledge, and social aspersions emanating from the truest source of wisdom—the bears. As these varied quotes indicate, Treadwell’s standing in the pre/post/modern world was multiply precarious.

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The most concise insinuation of Treadwell’s inadequacies occurs when Herzog shows a photograph of young Treadwell with teddy bear. Again, as in a Greek tragedy, the fate of Treadwell seemed ordained and immutable from the start. The message is clear. Treadwell’s closeness to bears was founded upon childish logic that did not account for the real nature of bears. That Treadwell held onto these attachments as an adult is taken as a sign of his immaturity and irrationality. Herzog’s modernism is apparent here, for modernity aims to discard childish behavior (itself often associated with premodern perspectives) in the process of defining social advancement. Herzog’s imagery thus reiterates the negative scientific attitude toward anthropomorphism that is prevalent in modernity. Without doubt, Treadwell’s actions do damage his own cause. Treadwell was a victim of his own video production process, whereby he became enamored with the image he had created, inadvertently producing a caricature of himself in the midst of describing his own exploits. And while Herzog did not foist these irrationalities upon Treadwell, he certainly exploited them in an efficient manner, for it is difficult not to come away from Grizzly Man with the sense that Treadwell was troubled. Perhaps because it did not fit into his moral tale, Herzog did not explore other explanations for Treadwell’s behavior, ones that would make Treadwell appear more rational. Instead, moviegoers are left to take Treadwell’s irrationality at face value. In contrast to Treadwell’s irrationality, the sober nature of Herzog’s narrative seemingly substantiates the validity of his own perspective. In an act of displacement, Herzog’s objective rationality is verified by relentless scrutiny of Treadwell’s erratic behavior rather than with the intrinsic attributes of Herzog’s own modern logic. Indeed, Herzog’s modern logic remains unexamined to the last. Herzog does portray animal agency of a sort. In a mechanistic depiction of power attuned to modernism, the grizzly certainly flexed its muscle to the severe disadvantage of Treadwell and Huguenard. Yet, there is significant distortion in his telling. To be sure, it is a real event, but it is also culturally iconic at one and the same time, referencing the horrific essence of Ursus arctos horribilis that supposedly pervades the species as a whole. Herzog’s failure here is to mistake agency for magnitude. Herzog’s grizzly is in truth little different from the Cartesian conception of animals. Descartes observed the beating heart of an animal, yet saw it as an automatic tendency that possessed no flexibility.

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Indeed, it was the perfect beat of the heart that allowed Descartes to disavow animal agency.21 Descartes went even further to suggest that animals could be superior to humans in such rigid propensities. In the same way, Herzog’s grizzly is more perfect than humans. It is designed to kill on a grand scale. Given the more recent insights of Darwinism, Herzog does not deny animal agency entirely, but rather portrays it as fundamentally different from human agency. Herzog’s tale is not novel, but only retells a story that has long been incorporated into the modern psyche. Grizzly Man is the classic story of man versus nature in its most stark and unforgiving form. As such, Herzog’s representation of grizzlies is more dangerous than Treadwell’s, even though Treadwell is the one who is now dead. Because 21st century viewers can smugly assume Treadwell was deluded, there is nothing to fear there. Conversely, despite its clarity, Herzog’s vision of animal agency is worse than Treadwell’s imagined community because Herzog is resolutely satisfied with the legacy of enlightenment. For exactly this reason, it is more important to contest Herzog’s representation of nonhumans. The Geometry of Agency Faced with these failures to adequately account for animals and their agency, this section navigates a third way through human-nonhuman relations that does not obliterate distance or overstate the incommensurability of humans and nonhumans. This task necessarily requires thinking about space in a new way that acknowledges the different attributes of nonhuman species, yet recognizes commonalities. This reconceptualization involves a distinct geometry that situates humans and nonhumans in a common context, whereby humans can reconsider their relationship to other animals. To this end, this section draws upon Treadwell’s own designation of the Grizzly Maze, a region located in the vicinity of Kaflia Bay, Alaska. By happenstance, Treadwell’s designation is more helpful than he probably knew, for it is remindful of Deleuze and Guattari’s examination of Franz Kafka. In their respective works, these three authors repeatedly blur the distinction between humans and other animals. 21 Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 1999).

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Deleuze and Guattari are intrigued by Kafka because of the revolutionary potential of his writing style, one reason for this being that the nature of the protagonists in Kafka’s stories is unclear. In speaking of Kafka’s writings, Deleuze and Guattari contend, “They are essentially animalistic even though there are not animals in all the stories. According to Kafka, the animal is the object par excellence of the story: to try to find a way out, to trace a line of escape.”22 They go further to state that “there is no possibility of distinguishing those cases where the animal is treated as an animal and those where it is part of a metamorphosis; everything in the animal is a metamorphosis, and the metamorphosis is part of a single circuit of the becoming-human of the animal and the becoming-animal of the human.”23 This assessment merges well with Treadwell’s comments on metamorphism, which identified a mutable physicality amid a dynamic terrain. Kafka’s stories thus affirm the presence of a common “attribute” that unifies human and nonhuman. Indeed, many of Kafka’s well known stories contain “animal” protagonists, notably The Metamorphosis, Report to an Academy, and The Burrow.24 In the first, the protagonist changes from man to cockroach, while in the second the main character retells his transformation from ape to man. As noted above, however, a preoccupation with actual animals is unnecessary, for Kafka’s human characters frequently exhibit animalistic tendencies. In defining this commonality, Kafka’s stories do not ascribe animality to a particular species. The notion of human and animal is somewhat nonsensical in this context, for the terms do not refer to a particular biological form—be it animal or human. Rather, the commonality refers to a way of being, or more correctly a process, by which a particular biological form comes into being. In this philosophical perspective, becoming takes precedence over being even though the process of becoming necessarily takes a form at any given point in time. As indicated below, this process of becoming is fundamental to the character of grizzlies and to the ecological assemblages in which they exist.

22 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 34. 23 Ibid., 35. 24 Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (New York: Bantam, 1986); Franz Kafka, “A Report to the Academy,” Collected Stories (New York: Knopf, 1993); Franz Kafka, “The burrow,” Collected Stories (New York: Knopf, 1993).

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Deleuze and Guattari are unusual in that they are commonly associated with post-structuralism, yet materialist in their approach. One of the main concepts that grounds their philosophy is their notion of an assemblage. An assemblage is a loose concatenation of entities that shift their relations over time, occasionally bringing new entities or capacities into being. Since the entities that comprise assemblages include humans and nonhumans, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical framework is quite ecological. Significantly, assemblages take shape at any number of scales. They may include networks within the body (as in their notion of a Body without Organs), a colony of ants, a pack of wolves, or geographically extensive patterns of nomadism.25 Entities that comprise assemblages are also typified by different temporalities that productively engage with one another. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari state: Kafka’s animals never refer to a mythology or to archetypes but correspond solely to new levels, zones of liberated intensities where contents free themselves from their forms as well as from their expressions, from the signifier that formalized them. There is no longer anything but movements, vibrations, thresholds in a deserted matter: animals, mice, dogs, apes, cockroaches are distinguished only by this or that threshold, this or that vibration, by the particular underground tunnel in the rhizome or the burrow.26

Neither entities, nor the assemblages they comprise, are stable in structure, for an interactive relationship exists between the two. These heterogeneous scales and periodicities form the context for strange co-minglings, whereby entities and assemblages are transformed. Consequently, assemblages (and the entities that generate them) are characterized by the process of becoming. Such assemblages are evident in the work of Kafka: in the bureaucratic systems of The Trial, the architectural incongruities of The Castle, and the bifurcating pathways of The Burrow.27 Life within assemblages is characterized by uncertainty. In The Trial, the protagonist (K) is persistently uncertain about the nature of legal proceedings, the relations between people, and his standing within this entire milieu. For these

25 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 26 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 13. 27 Franz Kafka, The Trial (New York: Schocken Books, 1995); Franz Kafka, The Castle (New York: Knopf, 1954); Franz Kafka, 1993, “The burrow.”

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reasons, K is rather clumsy in his endeavors. It is informative that Kafka’s stories frequently find the protagonist in the midst of a dilemma (that is, an assemblage), the predicament of which has no clear origin. Consequently, much of the time, the course of events is carried along by chance encounters with other individuals who also possess partial knowledge. The assemblage, in its ephemerality, is formed out of these serial relations. In The Burrow, the protagonist is constantly monitoring and re-constructing his underground abode, yet, despite all efforts, the burrow continually transforms itself. Assemblages are particularly instructive in the case of Timothy Treadwell and Alaskan grizzly bears. Much as Kafka’s protagonists feel their way through disjointed corridors, streets, and bureaucracies, grizzlies near Kaflia Bay thread their way through tangled vegetation (and other animal species). Treadwell designated one particular zone as the Grizzly Maze, though there is no reason to consider this specific area to be distinct in kind. Treadwell described the maze in a manner that is amenable to a Kafkaesque interpretation. As he described it: The Maze consisted of two enormous freshwater lakes connected by a creek and surrounded by a vast, dense jungle of greenery. Fifteen-foothigh alders and spiny shrubs cloaked the floor of the Maze, creating a twisting thicket between the two lakes. The tangle would be absolutely impenetrable if not for the grizzlies that thrived in this environment. Over the centuries, the bears had carved an intricate series of tunnels through the landscape.28

Treadwell explicitly highlights the agency of grizzlies, noting that bears gradually carved out an intricate network of trails. There is reason to assume these tunnels were not constructed in a day, but rather over an extended period of time, perhaps (as Treadwell suggests) many years. During the process of construction, the wilderness must certainly have been a bewilderment to these bears, much like Kafka’s cityscapes were to K. And there is no reason to believe the construction process is complete. To fully grasp this, it must be understood that grizzly habitat is not static in itself. As theories of evolution, ecological disequilibrium, and disturbance indicate, nature is in motion, perpetually involved in the process of recomposition. Nature is not a thing of unified, concrete substance, but more accurately an elongated series of loosely-connected relations—between wind, flies, coyotes, humans, geological

28

Treadwell and Palovak, 113.

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formations, and others—involving different speeds and temporalities. In short, environmental relations are not equivalent to an ecosystem. Tansley coined the term “ecosystem” many years ago, fully aware it was shorthand for environmental relationships, yet many ecologists have forgotten this point ever since Smut characterized an ecosystem as a unified, holistic entity.29 To the contrary, ecological temporalities are rather disheveled, the discordant timing of their comings and goings commensurate with the diverse materiality that constitutes any milieu. If Deleuze and Guattari’s post-structural emphasis on becoming is taken seriously, such is the case. To say that grizzlies are bewildered is simply to place them in the same asynchronous context as humans. At some point, Treadwell became part of this asynchronous becoming. From this perspective, the nature of space, both in terms of physical distance and the degree of (dis)similarity among species, is transformed. The spatial arrangements formed by ursine networks instantiate intricate concatenations that variably intersect with diverse organic and inorganic materials. Because of the maze’s heterogeneity, proximity and distance occur at the same time. Other species and other grizzlies are variably positioned along this spatial spectrum at different times of day and year due to the fluctuations of bears and the shifting habits of other entities. Grizzlies tap into these fluctuating conditions in an opportunistic fashion, and consequently these incoherent geometries of space do not align exactly with Treadwell’s zoomorphism (which brought him into proximity with bears) or Herzog’s modernism (which valorized distance from ursine predators). Having reconfigured space in terms of distance, it becomes possible to reassess the degree of (dis)similarity among species, specifically with regard to agency. The agency of nonhumans becomes more visible once nonhumans are placed within a four-dimensional context (their lifeworld). This method of analysis is far different from cognitive studies that assess the potential of particular brain types. Like humans, Alaskan grizzlies have made a tangible impact upon the landscape, the Grizzly Maze being only one example among many. Of more interest here, however, is the manner in which bears take advantage of these constructions in an ad hoc fashion. For all the benefits of the maze, it presents “problems” that bears must solve, for it is an ephemeral con-

29 Kurt Jax, “Holocoen and Ecosystem—on the Origin and Historical Consequences of Two Concepts,” Journal of the History of Biology 31 (1998): 113–142.

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struction that brings bears into contact with other temporalities. The problem referred to here is not a shortcoming, however, but rather a possibility that is always a problem in the first instance. This condition is akin to the scientific process, wherein analytical questions are the initial step toward problem resolution. These possibilities provide an important means of distinguishing Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective from Herzog’s representation. Though Deleuze and Guattari are materialists, their perspective is distinct from realism. Realism, in its matter-of-factness, is deterministic in its projection of the future. One’s surroundings are inert and relatively intractable, forcing human and nonhuman agents to concede to their circumstances. Realism is therefore an attitude of resignation. Herzog’s depiction of grizzly and man is definitively realist, a fact accentuated by the simplicity of the cinematography and narrative in Grizzly Man. Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages do not circumscribe action in such a restrictive manner, because assemblages are dynamically ephemeral by definition. The heterogeneous periodicities that constitute an assemblage open and close doors (a la Kafka) all the time by virtue of the new co-minglings they bring into being. To be clear, this is not to say the material world does not constrain agents, but rather that the form of material constraints is continually shifting. Coincident with constraints are emergent formations that offer agents opportunities that were previously unseen or unrecognized. Deleuze and Guattari can therefore distinguish between the notions of the virtual and the actual. The virtual refers to the realm of potential actions that may come into being, while the actual refers to actions that have been actualized. Most virtualities are not actualized, but all virtual actions do in fact exist. Actualizations reconfigure the material world, whereby a new spate of virtualities is opened up, and by this process of unfolding actualizations are the means through which individual form and identity are created. The selection of actualities from among the virtualities creates a series of events that molds an entity by virtue of the limitations and potentialities these selections put into place. As Deleuze and Guattari state, “the first characteristic of these proliferating series is that they work to unblock a situation that had closed elsewhere in an impasse.”30 Altogether, these series form the life history of a being by creating tangents of interaction, and these series,

30

Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 53.

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in turn, can extend beyond a single lifetime to produce a heritage or species with distinguishable form yet energized by the same persistent desirousness. These theoretical insights can be utilized to consider grizzlies and examine Herzog’s narrative. Since Deleuze and Guattari are materialists and Herzog gravitates toward realism, it is appropriate to look at actual observations of grizzlies in order to assess which depiction is more compatible with actual events. Although a number of grizzly traits could be explored in this fashion, the diet of grizzlies is the most relevant since Treadwell and Huguenard were partially eaten. Indeed, the inversion of power, in which the human becomes the prey, lies at the heart of the film. The possibility of such an event not only carries significance for the individual being eaten, but for humanity at large as well. To be consumed is not only a violent event; it is also to be animalized like other species of prey. David Quammen attributes this haunting, persistent fear of consumption to two distinct causes. He contends it is a vestigial psychological attribute that developed in humans when they lived amongst other species. Since that time, Quammen contends that “alpha predators have kept us acutely aware of our membership within the natural world. They’ve done it by reminding us that to them we’re just another flavor of meat.” To the degree this explanation mimics sociobiological theory it can be rightly criticized. Quammen also suggests a political rational revolving around retribution by noting that, “At some subliminal level, the grizzly is perceived as a guerrilla warrior, fighting the final noisome skirmishes in a war of territorial seizure that began with Lewis and Clark, continued with the great cattle drives up the Bozeman Trail, and reached its provisional culmination with the surrender of Chief Joseph and his harried remnant of Nez Perce in the Bearpaw Mountains.” The latter rationale resonates more clearly with the transition toward modernism and the misgivings it has generated. Despite the fearsome image of the grizzly, researchers have known for some time that grizzly bears are primarily vegetarian. In 1944, Adolph Murie ascertained that grizzlies primarily rely upon vegetation for their sustenance.31 In his review of grizzly studies, Pearson stated that, “In no area where the grizzly bear has been studied does the species feed exclusively on one particular item throughout the annual cycle. Food

31

Adolph Murie, The Wolves of Mount McKinley (Washington: U.S. GPO, 1944).

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items important in the early spring are often insignificant later in the season.”32 Diversity in the grizzly’s diet is considerable. In addition to berries and grasses, grizzlies have been observed consuming large quantities of fungal sporocarps (mushrooms and truffles), earthworms, and ants.33 Carrion of different types also functions within a “typical” grizzly diet. These facts are not intended to re-visualize the grizzly as a benevolent animal—that would run counter to some of the insights proffered by Deleuze and Guattari—but to illustrate that the grizzly is truly omnivorous in the grandest sense of the word. Importantly, the territoriality of grizzlies shifts in accordance with oscillations in their consumptive patterns, as the spatiality of bears meanders in response to ever-changing environmental assemblages, impacting where and when grizzlies eat. For instance, Tom Smith observed that grizzlies nearly doubled their use of a particular river on the only day when humans were not present. Similarly, Tamara Olson and colleagues suggest the crepuscular (i.e. dusk and dawn) eating habits of grizzlies may be a consequence of diurnal human activity. Thus, grizzly territoriality, being another variable that may be used to explain the death of Treadwell, is not only linked to changing consumption patterns, but is flexible in its own right, reflecting a give and take that diverges substantially from intransigent behavior. These observations indicate that grizzlies shift the location and timing of consumption in response to human activities.34 At longer time-scales, one would expect these consumptive patterns to shift from season to season in response to the variability of human activity and other variables. The characteristic of omnivory and its attendant spatiality are critical to understanding grizzly agency, for it connotes flexibility and formlessness. Despite the human tendency to seek nonhuman agency in forms that look human, it is actually the formless attribute of flexibility

32 Arthur M. Pearson, The Northern Interior Grizzly Bear Ursus Arctos L., Canadian Wildlife Service Report Series Number 34. (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1975), 31. 33 David J. Mattson, Marilyn G. French, and Steven P. French, “Consumption of Earthworms by Yellowstone Grizzly Bears,” Ursus 13 (2002): 105–10; David J. Mattson, Shannon R. Podruzny, Mark A. Haroldson, “Consumption of Fungal Sporocarps by Yellowstone Grizzly Bears,” Ursus 13 (2002): 95–103; Kåre Elgmork and Sigmund Unander, “Brown Bear Use of Ant Mounds in Scandanavia,” Ursus 10 (1998): 269–74. 34 Tom S. Smith, “The Effect of Human Activity on Brown Bear Use of the Kulik River,” Ursus 13 (2002): 257–67; Tamara L. Olsen, Ronald C. Squibb, and Barrie K. Gilbert, “Brown Bear Diurnal Activity and Human Use: A Comparison of Two Salmon Streams,” Ursus 10 (1998): 547–55.

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that is necessary to grasping grizzly agency. As Shepard and Sanders characterize this paradox: From a naturalistic and perceptual point of view, there is nothing else like a bear in human experience: its humanlike foot and dexterity of forepaws, its tendency to stand erect, its binocular vision in spite of the big nose, its amazingly manlike anatomy when skinned. But its major qualification for viziership is a consequence of its omnivorousness, its versatility. It may be difficult to overestimate the importance of this one fact, that the personality of the bear is largely the consequence of a big omni eater, the finder of whatever is ripe and the killer when necessary. It is the bear’s broad, searching persistent openness that makes contact with us, that flash of recognition in which men instantly perceive a fellow being whose questing provocation, whose garrulous, taciturn, lazy ways, even whose obligations and commitments to hunt, to hole up, and to dominate the space he lives in are familiar. The bear is a special model of human flexibility, a generalist set against a world of specialists.35

That “openness” is manifest in Treadwell’s Grizzly Maze, wherein opportunities come and go along different time-scales (signaled by vibrations in Deleuze and Guattari). By disengaging form from agency, new theoretical possibilities are available for rethinking the similarity between humans and other species. Firstly, this perspective makes it possible for similarities and differences to coexist at the same time, since a common formless desirousness underlies the particular bodies and habits perceived by humans. Secondly, it is not human likeness that verifies agency but instead an undetermined form of interaction in the world (that is enact-able by grizzlies and other species). This line of thought can be inverted to show how flexibility, which is pervasive throughout the biological world, was the prerequisite for the emergence of humanity. In A Report to the Academy, Kafka tells the story of an ape that has transformed himself into a human. In retelling the nature of this transformation, the ape states that it was his desire for a “way out” from captivity that led to his transformation. Deleuze and Guattari would refer to this as a “line of flight,” an attribute that is a common property in the world.36 In stating such, Kafka’s ape notes that “I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason.”37 35

Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders, The Sacred Paw (New York: Viking Press, 1985), 72. 36 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaue. 37 Franz Kafka, “A Report to the Academy,” 203.

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Humanity is secondary here, for it is the problem-solving technique that brought humanity about. The former ape does not want freedom, for this is a human illusion. He recognizes that he is part of an assemblage from which he can never be entirely extracted. Such is life in a maze, where freedom (in its vacuous sense) runs counter to a line of flight, where the ephemeral resources available produce possibilities as well as limitations. To the extent that a line of flight takes advantage of surrounding opportunities, it is a component that drives evolutionary processes (that is, becoming). Treadwell became part of another’s becoming during one of his yearly visits to Alaska. Yet, the conclusion to be drawn from Deleuze and Guattari’s insights is much different from Herzog’s rendering. From Herzog, moviegoers gather a modern vision of the bear, one that performs the same function as Torgovnick’s primitive man: the identity of progressive modern man is established by negation with the rigid, primordial, archetypal animal. There is something horrible in the events that transpired, perhaps a penalty to be paid by Treadwell for acting like a bear. For Herzog, the unconstrained aggression put forth by the grizzly was resolute in its denial of humanity. This characterization differs considerably from Deleuze and Guattari’s depiction of attacks. As they note in defense of Kafka: If Bachelard is unfair to Kafka when he compares him to Lautreamont, this is because he assumes above all else that the dynamic essence of the animal lies in freedom and aggression: Madoror’s becoming-animal are attacks that are all the more cruel in being free and gratuitous. It is not like this in Kafka; it is the exact opposite, and we could even say that his concept is the more correct one from the point of view of Nature itself.38

In thinking of an assemblage, it becomes apparent that conflict with humans is not the dominant center of focus for grizzlies, for the world is much larger than this archetypal conflict allows. In this theoretical perspective, human-nonhuman conflicts are diffused, diminished in their prominence, as they become one event among many. The consequence to be paid for this reading is that grizzly agency cannot be found in the magnitude, or grotesqueness, of these conflicts. It must be found elsewhere, though not detached from the transient circumstances developing within an assemblage.

38

Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 35.

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To say that Treadwell’s demise was a manifestation of grizzly agency simply because it involved the killing of a man is to misunderstand the problematic. As such, an alternate thesis based upon the multifocal character of assemblages is put forward here. Specifically, the death of Treadwell exemplifies nonhuman agency because it was an opportunistic happenstance directly attributable to living within a maze comprised of humans and nonhumans. This analysis shifts the theoretical focus toward the heterogeneous ecologies that surround grizzlies. Accordingly, Treadwell’s death was not an inevitable, beastly act of consumption, but rather an act of omnivory that reflected grizzly agency by virtue of its flexibility. The meaning of omnivory presented here must not be misconstrued, for omnivory does not imply the mindless consumption of whatever is available and unfortunate enough to be within the path of a bear. Such omnivory would be mechanistic and represent no advance upon Descartes’ perspective. A mechanistic conception of omnivory can justly be said to fail because the plodding behavior of grizzly bears in the field indicates otherwise. The act of carnivory was natural, but it was only a specific selection within an omnivore’s diet, a selection that requires agency. The grizzly is not an agent because it kills a man, but rather because it elects to kill a man amid a collection of other edible entities. The fact that Treadwell survived for thirteen years in Alaska without being attacked, and that grizzly attacks are rare in general, is attributable to this condition. This goes against the single-minded, mechanistic conception of nonhumans widely propagated in modernity. Nonetheless, Herzog portrayed Treadwell’s death as the inevitable outcome of the grizzly’s teleology, a teleology that is so instinctual that it subverts the notion of nonhuman agency. Purposefully or not, Herzog’s narrative unfortunately reaffirms this modern belief more than it challenges its foundation. Meaning of an End Contrary to the narrative in Grizzly Man, the perspective outlined here has stronger affinities with Treadwell’s conception of grizzlies. More than Herzog, Treadwell recognized considerable variability within the Alaskan bear population. Not only did he name individual bears, but he also acknowledged that he could be killed by one of these grizzlies. Despite Herzog’s assertions, Treadwell acknowledges the tenuous nature of his existence in the field. These admissions were an implicit

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acknowledgement of ursine flexibility, the characteristic of bears that makes them human-like. In this flexibility (their omnivory being one manifestation), there is a connection with the assemblages of Deleuze and Guattari. Ultimately, however, the affinities end, for assemblages contain many more forms of agency than Treadwell’s anthropomorphism could comprehend. The approach taken here has two primary advantages. The Deleuzian perspective valorizes nonhuman agency in a manner that is accessible to innumerable forms of embodiment. This extends well beyond grizzlies and attacks upon humans to include many other forms of action. Movement, being multi-directional at its core, is perhaps the most illustrative and ubiquitous manifestation of agency. The Grizzly Maze and ecological assemblages in general are instances of this propensity. Secondly, this perspective creates a context for the improvement of human-nonhuman relations because it shows that nonhuman agency is not predominantly directed against humans. This contrasts with Herzog’s modernist perspective, which pits nature against man. In large part, Herzog’s viewpoint is a zero-sum proposition, in which an increase of nonhuman agency represents a decline in human agency. If that equation were true, it might make sense to deny nonhuman agency or quash it whenever it rears its ugly head. In contrast, the power of nonhumans becomes more acceptable in the alternate scenario provided here because animal agency is “seemingly” diminished when its consequences are more evenly diffused and dissipated throughout the landscape.

DANCING PENGUINS AND A PRETENTIOUS RACCOON: ANIMATED ANIMALS AND 21ST CENTURY ENVIRONMENTALISM Sarah E. McFarland A number of hugely popular animated films in the last few years have featured nonhuman rather than human characters to explore contemporary environmental issues. Some of these films are paradoxical, representing multiple and conflicting pressures about conservationism and pessimism in their portrayal of nonhuman animals and their agency in the midst of habitat destruction and impending extinction, while still maintaining a “Hollywood happy ending.” This chapter examines the relationships between animal dramas, agency, and environmentalism in two popular animated films that have nonhuman protagonists and address issues of habitat destruction, species extinction, and conservationism: Happy Feet1 and Over the Hedge,2 both released in 2006. These films purport to demonstrate the kind of relationship humans should have with other animals and make wildlife seem so familiar that some children encountering real, actual members of represented species experience disappointment upon discovering that they do not sing, dance, talk, and plan an attack on a suburban home.3 How can a real raccoon stand up against Bruce Willis’ portrayal of RJ? How can a real penguin compare to the tap dancing Mumble? Animation allows these filmmakers to dodge charges of humanizing or misrepresenting the lives of their nonhuman subjects because those subjects are purely fictional characters. However, the films still affect the treatment of real animals because viewers are encouraged to imagine and sympathize with the lives of other creatures via unrealistically charismatic animated characters. 1 George Miller and Warren Coleman, Happy Feet. Warner Brothers, November 2006. 2 Tim Johnson and Karey Kirkpatrick, Over the Hedge. DreamWorks Animation SKG, May 2006. 3 John Berger writes about the disappointment zoo visitors feel upon realizing that real animals especially perhaps those imprisoned in exhibits for human consumption are boring and do very little. Their lives are certainly nothing like the animated (in both senses of the word) lives of animals on screen. See John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon Press, 1980), 1–26.

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Or, as Derek Bouse asks, “if a species were widely perceived as being unfaithful, disloyal, untrustworthy, perhaps even treacherous, would there be popular support for it if it were faced with extinction?”4 There are several problems entwined with the ways that these kinds of films represent nonhuman animals and agency that have real consequences for the actual living and breathing beings, but this chapter will focus on three. As the pages that follow will show, these movies utilize familiar tropes of animal figures that have become recognizable because of popular characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Lassie, but they reify in a more insidious way those traditional concepts about animals while making us think they are more sophisticated. In this regard, we see that the animal characters are both different from the simplistic humanized mouse (or mouse-ized human) from the early Disney shows, and the same in that both are caricatures of animality in general. Secondly, the films purportedly offer a new vision of animal agency that supports the environmental solutions portrayed in their scenes but underneath still demands that nonhuman animals become more like humans before they are recognized. In other words, the animal characters appear to have agency in the fullest sense of the word, but in fact it is a limited agency—they do act, but they have to act in specific, humanlike ways. Finally, both Happy Feet and Over the Hedge require action on the part of animals rather than humans to halt what otherwise appears to be “natural” human behaviors, although in the one case the human antagonists modify their behavior and in the other the nonhumans have to modify theirs. As I will show, part of the difference between these two behaviors is rooted in the privileging of wildness over domesticity. There are a number of important similarities between the plots of these two films as well. Both portray an environment suffering from the encroachment of humans, the narrowing of the animals’ natural habitat ranges, and the ensuing consequences to their food supply. Both feature nonhuman heroes who are humanlike in their behaviors and who mediate between the worlds of animals and their human intruders. The more “natural” animals in both films reject their heroes at first, but a human-oriented event results in their acceptance. Finally, both

4 Derek Bouse, Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 161.

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pretend to offer a dialogue about real problems, but give false resolutions (one temporary and one imaginary). Happy Feet is the 2006 Warner Brothers animated film about Mumble, a tap-dancing penguin who saves his penguin colony from starvation caused by the fishing industry. It garnered much attention from the conservative media because of its pseudo-environmentalist message. Fox News’ Neil Cavuto says Happy Feet is an “animated Inconvenient Truth” and that he “half-expected to see an animated version of Al Gore pop up.”5 Talk-show host Michael Medved, in an online post titled “Don’t Be Misled by Crappy Feet,” states that “The propagandistic theme suggests that the biggest menace for the lovable penguins is the human race—stealing the fish on which the birds depend, or ruining Planet Earth through pollution and global warming.”6 And, in fact, the film’s marketing directors have emphasized this idea by including both a clip about the environmental dangers of overfishing and a wallet card with a list of “sustainable fish” in their DVD packaging of Happy Feet.7 It is certainly true that the film contains an environmentalist subplot: the fish the penguins need to survive are scarce, and Mumble—after being shunned by his community because he can neither sing nor stop dancing—sets out to find out why. He encounters Lovelace, a rockhopper penguin who is thought to be an oracle because of the “sacred talisman” around his neck, which is actually a plastic six-pack ring that eventually becomes a noose. Mumble follows a trail of trash until he discovers a fishing trawler and realizes that humans are overfishing the area, taking the food the penguins need to survive. Mumble follows a trawler and is caught and put in an exhibit at a zoo, where, dejected, he tries to communicate with a young girl by dancing for her. The humans are so impressed with his dancing that they let him return home—tagged with a tracking device—and follow him there. What happens next is a scene that plays on the hopes of many environmentalists: the scientists film the penguins dancing, a United Nations-type international body declares that the penguins should be protected and makes the area off-limits to fishing, the fish return in great numbers, 5 Reported on Think Progress weblog on November 21, 2006 (accessed April 2, 2007). 6 Michael Medved, “Don’t Be Misled by ‘Crappy Feet’!” (accessed April 2, 2007). 7 By “sustainable” they mean that the fish can be “harvested” and eaten without doing significant damage to the environment. There is no mention of whether or not the fish consider this action one they think should be sustained.

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and the film closes with the abundant and well-fed penguins dancing, singing, and eating. All is well. Similarly, DreamWorks’ Over the Hedge is a film about a group of animals who awaken from their winter hibernation to discover their 54 acres of forest is now a single acre enclosed by a tall hedge, surrounded by 53 acres of manicured lawns, swimming pools, and people: a suburb was built during their long rest. As the animals try to adapt to their new world, audiences witness their conversion from eating plants to eating garbage, the impact of the housing development on the animals’ health and behavior, and the general themes of “wild versus tame” and “natural versus cultural.” This film also has a happy conclusion: at the end of Over the Hedge, the squirrel Hammy solves the food shortage problem by finding nuts he had buried the previous summer. While Gladys Sharp, the human antagonist and homeowner’s association president, is “worried about the end of suburban peace and tranquility” when wildlife “invades” her property, the film also exposes issues of forest destruction and environmental responsibility, showing a new side to a familiar scene for viewers in a country where so many people have moved out of the major cities. Many of us have personal experience with some of the wild animals that coexist with humans in suburban areas, including deer, raccoons, opossums, skunks, squirrels, and birds, as well as the “vermin”—animals like mice, rats, pigeons, and various insects. These wildlife species have adapted to the relentless spread of humans and now thrive in urban areas. Cockroaches would not be nearly as successful a species without the human-constructed habitats that provide them with moderate indoor temperatures, water, and food, as Matthew Candelaria argues in this volume. Over the Hedge brings all of these issues to the fore as the animal characters struggle to find enough food to survive the upcoming winter and turn to human junk food because the oak trees and berry bushes they used to depend on have been chopped down and replaced with manicured lawns and McMansions. Many readers are likely familiar with the different uses of humanlike animals in film and television shows, but there are three that I think led to the development of the kinds of representations we see in films like Happy Feet and Over the Hedge. First, those that create the most basic nonhuman characters have no pretense of accuracy to the animal lives being represented. Instead, animal figures are placed in human environments (not representations of their natural ones),

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act essentially as humans would, and have little or no interaction with humans as such. Mickey Mouse is the most familiar example of this kind of animal portrayal.8 The next use of nonhumans takes the extreme opposite approach, portraying animals as being integral to human existence. Lassie, for example, is shown to have agency, intellect, and communicative ability that is superior to most family pets, and that was part of her charm. This version shows close companionship between humans and nonhumans and includes the Lassie television shows, Flipper, Old Yeller, and the Free Willy movies, among many others. In the last 20 years another version has become popular with the rise of cable television: animal-based television shows. These shows use sophisticated filming and editing techniques to construct false images of the physical environments around the animals and utilize narrative voice-overs to manipulate the ways that audiences understand what they see on the screen. The same is true of the “nature films” popular in the mid-20th century, as Gregg Mitman has so convincingly shown in his book Reel Nature and Derek Bouse traces with his historical analysis in Wildlife Films.9 More recently, for example, members of a colony of meercats on Animal Planet’s Meercat Manor are not only given names and shown to have some agency, but their behavior and conflicts are described in human terms. Finally, Happy Feet, Over the Hedge, and a number of other recent animated animal-based feature films continue in this style.10 In computer-animated films about nonhuman animals, nature is literally framed and scripted by human hands using human technology for human ends; simulated natural environments take the place of

8 As I child I remember asking my father why Goofy the dog stood upright, talked, and wore clothes, but Pluto the dog did not. I do not recall getting a satisfactory answer, but I do think that the faulty logic behind the representations of some animal figures as stand-ins for humans and some as stand-ins for companion animals is very apparent in this example. 9 See Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) and Derek Bouse’s Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 10 David Whitley’s The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) became available too late to be properly considered for this chapter. His focus on films including Bambi, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King develops from an ecocritical perspective the power of Disney to simplify the dualities of nature in our cultural imagination.

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the real thing. As Mitman says of nature films, these animated films also strive to capture and recreate an experience of unspoiled nature. They have blended scientific research and vernacular knowledge, education and entertainment, authenticity and artifice. As art and science, nature films seek to reproduce the aesthetic qualities of pristine wilderness and to preserve the wildlife that is fast vanishing from the face of the earth. As entertainment, they promise enlightenment and thrills simultaneously.11

Furthermore, the nonhuman characters are depicted in unrealistic and deceitful ways. Their physical characteristics are exaggerated to appeal to human sentimentality, pedomorphized to “follow ethology’s Kindchenschema (baby-appeal) by endowing animals with enlarged eyes and rounded infantile features designed to evoke endearment and protectiveness.”12 The films use the concept of what nonhuman animals actually do rather loosely in other ways as well, having them talk, share living space with species they never would associate with in real life, create companionships in unrealistic ways, and otherwise model their behavior after human communities. As Frans de Waal says in The Ape and the Sushi Master, The talking animals on television, the satirical depiction of public figures, and the naïve attribution of human qualities to animals have little to do with what we know about the animals themselves. In a tradition going back to the folktales, Aesop, and La Fontaine, this kind of anthropomorphism serves human purposes: to mock, educate, moralize, and entertain. Most of it further satisfies the picture, cherished by many, of the animal kingdom as a peaceable and cozy paradise. The fact that, in reality, animals kill and devour each other, die of starvation and disease, or are indifferent to each other, does not fit the idealized image.13

In addition to their deliberate appeals to emotions, these films project human values onto their nonhuman characters so that their survival further engages the viewers’ feelings. Happy Feet’s Mumble is the ideal heroic figure: he is independent, fearless, brave, smart, and loyal, striking out on his own to help solve a problem that his own community is not wise enough to recognize or face—despite his being outcast by

11

Mitman, 3. Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 71–72. 13 De Waal, 73–74. 12

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that community. Similarly, Over the Hedge’s Vern is wise, thoughtful, and brave despite his fears, putting his unusual animal family before his own self-interest. These children’s movies use animals to create sentiment that sells movie tickets. These films have a great amount of power when it comes to the treatment of other species and the creation of an environmental ethic for each new generation; for many viewers, they are the first and sometimes only experience with “wild” “animal” species. As Margaret King has argued about Disney productions aimed at children, the “empathetic identification with animals laid the groundwork for the American eco-political climate from the 1960s onward,” defining the appropriate relationship between humans and the world around them. As she says, “The implications of film drama featuring animal rather than human stars hold the key to understanding not only the human/nature faceoff as a cultural problem, but the power of film to temper, guide, and shape that relationship.”14 David Whitley goes further by suggesting that children’s films can provide young audiences with a “relatively safe sphere within which crucial [environmental] issues could be rehearsed and even—in light forms—explored.”15 However, I argue that none of these films is in fact environmentally progressive and that they are actually injurious to other animal species: while the films force the viewer to identify with the animal victims against their human antagonizers, they also resolve their respective problems by the end of the film, leaving viewers without a call to action to change human behavior toward other animals. Nonhuman animals are represented as creatures with overt agency; there is no question that the characters in these films have the ability to act consciously on the environment around them and to affect other beings, which further suggests that audiences have no responsibility to make changes in their behavior toward nonhumans. Like much pseudo-environmentalism today, the films are ineffective and result in entertainment, but not environmentalist action. They therefore maintain an optimistic tone without the respect and conservationism that should go with an optimistic tone. Over the Hedge also utilizes a familiar conception of what being an “animal” means: the nonhumans struggling against the relentless 14

Margaret J. King, “The Audience in the Wilderness: The Disney Nature Films,” in Journal of Popular Film and Television 24.2 (1996 Summer): 60–68. 15 David Whitley, The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation. England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008. 3.

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suburbanization of America function as a cohesive category only by virtue of their non-humanness. Their little group is composed of a raccoon, a turtle, a squirrel, two opossums, a family of porcupines, a skunk and—eventually—her purebred and domesticated Persian cat lover. It does not matter what species the animals are to the logic of the film or its message because the specific species or realistic behavior of the characters is secondary to their human-like characteristics. In that sense, these films capitalize on the same desire for intimate contact with nonhuman animals of any variety that popularizes the cable television shows discussed above. They attempt to represent the essential nature of animality as symbolized by their nonhumanness and an exaggerated behavioral trait in a medium that can reach an audience of millions repeatedly—in the theater and at home on DVD. Of course it is illogical to consider that “the animal” is a cohesive category.16 In his later work, Jacques Derrida was particularly concerned with knowing animals as singular individuals when he critiques their use as distinctions between humans and other forms of being, saying that a fundamental error in imagination occurs when we declare “that there is one thing, one domain, one homogenous type of entity, which is called animality in general, for which any example would do the job.”17 His arguments about animality are discussed in depth in the introduction to this volume and will not be repeated here.18 However, the point is that other animals are not a singular entity because there is no such thing as “the” animal except through the very opposition human/animal that defines humanity as not-animal. There is no absolute limit between animal and human, just as there is no singular animal that is “the animal.” And yet, as we know, one of the most familiar binary oppositions is the human/all-other-species-(called-“animal”) binary opposition. This binary helps structure the primary character conflicts in these films: Mumble in Happy Feet and RJ in Over the Hedge each exhibits human behavior, to the consternation of their companions. Mumble’s tap dancing—a decidedly human activity—is initially snubbed by the other penguins, so much so that Mumble is banished from the commu-

16

Although it is done all the time, as this and the other essays in this collection show. Derrida, Of Spirit, Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1989), 57. 18 See Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger, “Approaching the Agency of Other Animals” in this volume. 17

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nity. He finds solace in a different species of penguin (the rockhopper penguin, represented in multiple roles by an accented Robin Williams) and eventually leaves them as well to find his real purpose: to save the entire penguin population from the “alien” humans and their fishing trawlers. RJ, similarly, is initially rejected by the multi-species family-like group of animals in Over the Hedge because he uses human devices like a golf bag and red wagon and because he prefers human food. In both films, the outcasts are only reconciled with their respective communities after they have demonstrated that their humanness is beneficial to the group. Mumble’s dancing is adopted by all the penguins after he returns to Antarctica followed by the “aliens,” and RJ is accepted after opening a can of Pringles-like snack chips, exposing the group to an explosion of artificial cheese flavor. While the penguins act out of both fear and awe and the animals in Over the Hedge respond with desire and perhaps an addiction to artificial flavoring, both films portray the human aspects of their behavior as an overwhelming force. In both cases, the nonhuman animals must adapt by adopting human characteristics and following the lead of the most human-like characters: Mumble and RJ. In Over the Hedge, the animals learn to provide for themselves within their new landscape by sneaking in through Gladys Sharp’s cat door and eating from her garbage and cupboards. It is not an easy transition for everyone, however, and we can see the conflict between the nonhumans who have already adapted to sharing space with humans and those who have not. Vern the turtle is reluctant to eat human food throughout the movie, and he is the strongest illustration of general resistance to humanization. When the group of hibernating animals in Over the Hedge awakens and begins collecting food for the next winter, Hammy the squirrel discovers the hedge that seems to extend forever: “It never ends!” he shouts.19 Vern goes exploring, figuring that “There’s only one way we’re going to find out what this thing is and what it’s all about: I’m going to go check it out.” He comes out in a well-manicured suburban backyard and discovers that instead of the variety of trees, bushes, brush, and so on that comprises a forest, now there is only row after row of houses, each like the next. But that is not the worst part: “Half the forest is gone! The berry bushes. Trees. They’re just gone! What will we do for food?” In contrast, RJ the adapted raccoon says, “It’s called a hedge, and it’s not to be feared! It’s the gateway to the good

19

The quotations from the film are my own transcription from the DVD version.

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life.” “The good life” thus transforms the diet of the forest animals from nuts and berries into the refuse of human society: fast food containers hold high-calorie scraps; potato chip bags hold salty snacks. In this way, the animals in Over the Hedge are more domesticated than the Emperor penguins on Antarctica in Happy Feet, and they also remind us of the tenuous hold many suburban animals have on wildness. I suspect that herein lies the reasons why one film promotes its environmentalism and the other does not: domestic animals are not given the same respect as wild ones are in environmentalist rhetoric, an extension of the fact that wilderness is valued more than constructed spaces. Barney Nelson, in her important examination of animal representations in the American Southwest, argues that “The dichotomy between wild and domestic animals is a construct of the imagination that influences the way Americans [. . .] view environmental and conservation issues.”20 Wildness, like wilderness, has traditionally been defined in opposition to controlled domesticity and rational, ordered civilization. According to Val Plumwood, wilderness “is the supposedly irrational and chaotic sphere represented by the primeval forest, the dangerous shadow place on the other side of the boundary of order.”21 Gladys Sharp’s extreme reaction to the forest animals in her yard reminds us that it is out there and frightening. In his influential early study, Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash says, “The first white visitors regarded wilderness as a moral and physical wasteland fit only for conquest and fructification in the name of progress, civilization, and Christianity.”22 He describes the effect of the thick Eastern forests on the early pioneers: “Account after account describes how the wilderness hemmed man [sic] in, concealing a host of real and imagined dangers.”23 The unknown of “wild” nature allows for the experience of the sublime whereas domestic spaces, like domesticated animals, are safe and therefore less frightening and awe-inducing. Charles Bowden describes false rumors about lions killing humans and says that despite the perceived danger, lions “are

20 Barney Nelson, The Wild and the Domestic: Animal Representation, Ecocriticism, and Western American Literature (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000), 24. 21 Val Plumwood. “Wilderness Skepticism and Wilderness Dualism.” The Great New Wilderness Debate, ed. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 652–90 at 656. 22 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), xii. 23 Nash, xvi.

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necessary, the menace is essential to us for reasons we can barely state. The mountains would have a new frightening emptiness if we could not imagine the soft padding of those clawed feet, the unflinching eyes scanning our every move, the muscles rippling under the tawny fur. He is out there.”24 Not only is the menace of the lion necessary for humans to define wilderness, so is the idea that the lion exists “out there,” once again confirming the distinction between the places humans are in control and places elsewhere. Wilderness is defined in contrast to humans and their cultural works, leaving animals who exist in spaces shared with humans and dependent on their refuse and shelters in a strange liminal space between wild and domesticated. Such an understanding of wilderness further restricts all nature to a status in opposition to culture. Plumwood argues that “the account of nature in terms of human absence leads to a polarizing assumption of a radical discontinuity between nature and culture which prevents us from seeing wilderness as the extreme end of a spectrum of mixtures of nature and culture.”25 There is a solution to this dilemma, however, one alluded to in Plumwood’s statement: to acknowledge nature and culture as aspects of a continuum instead of opposite ends of a binary, and so appreciate the wilderness all around us. As Gary Snyder astutely suggests, “Nature is not a place to visit, it is home—and within that home territory there are more familiar and less familiar places.”26 Plumwood suggests that “to overcome this dualism we need to reclaim the ground of continuity, to recognize both the culture which has been denied in the sphere conceived as pure nature, and to recognize the nature which has been denied in the sphere conceived as pure culture.”27 In recognizing the continuum of nature-culture, it becomes clear that the wilderness is not a static idea or even a place, but an ideal partially made manifest through our individual abilities to perceive, simultaneously, our sameness with the other around us, and to experience our own otherness in the face of difference. Those bugs on the picnic blanket and the weeds in a city lot can be little pieces of wilderness if we allow them to be so, as even animals living in suburban spaces can be awe-inducing.

24 Charles Bowden, “Love Among the Lion Killers.” On Nature’s Terms, ed. Thomas J. Lyon and Peter Stine (Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1992), 11–25 at 24. 25 Plumwood, 669. 26 Gary Snyder, “The Etiquette of Freedom.” The Practice of the Wild (New York: North Point Press, 1990), 3–24 at 7. 27 Plumwood, 670.

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This view changes the idea of wilderness preservation, becoming an issue of how humans interact and respect all kinds of situatedness, in addition to certain kinds of places, demanding a revolutionary shift in conservation movements and in the political sphere because “the ‘setaside’ approach has been emphasized to such exclusion by conservation elements in the green establishment precisely because revering nature in distant wilderness does not force us to reconsider nature in our daily relationships to ordinary land.”28 By reconsidering and revaluing the various ways that suburban animals are forced to interact and adapt to potentially detrimental human habits after losing their access to land, resources, and healthy food and water, perhaps humans can help enable the animals loosely represented by the figures in Over the Hedge to not only survive another winter but to thrive in their natural habitat. Whereas there has not been much of a move to politicize any environmentalist call around Over the Hedge’s revelations about suburbia, environmentalist groups and the news media have responded to Happy Feet’s popularity by advertising the predicament of the real penguins in the Antarctic. Bill Blakemore uses the film to springboard into a discussion of the risks to penguins of melting ice and overfishing, reporting that because the birds breed and incubate their eggs on the sea ice, global warming is as serious a threat as overfishing by large commercial fleets of trawlers.29 Michael McCarthy, the Environment Editor for The Independent, writes that populations of the rockhopper penguin—represented by the popular Lovelace in the film—have undergone a sharp decline since the year 2000 and an 85% decline since 1932, probably as a result of both climate change and an inability to recover quickly from population crashes that happen as a result of calamitous events like poisonous algae blooms.30 Other progressive causes have benefited from the popularity of the film as well. However, the environmentalist message of either of these films is not quite as straightforward as either the conservative media assert or the film’s marketing directors want to claim.

28

Plumwood, 667. Bill Blakemore, “‘Happy Feet’ Not So Happy: Penguins Endangered by Melting Ice, Overfishing,” ABC News online, November 28, 2006 (accessed March 26, 2007). 30 Michael McCarthy, “Unhappy Times for Hit Penguin in ‘Happy Feet,’ ” The Independent Online, December 23, 2006 (accessed March 26, 2007). 29

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With their optimistic happy Hollywood endings, both films show us that we have no obligation to change our approach to the environment, housing and building practices, or industrialized fishing industries in real life. In other words, the films familiarize audiences with environmental concerns while leaving us blameless for the harm we cause other animals, because, on the one hand, we do not have any obligation to recognize their rights to exist unless the penguins or the polar bears or the [insert species name here] start singing and dancing for us; and on the other hand, the animals will solve their problems on their own (with a little help from a hyperactive squirrel and a can of soda). Both sets of animals have to behave outside of their normal adaptive behaviors, in the one case by dancing and in the other by eating human trash instead of bark, nuts, and berries. These problems are a result of both films co-opting a preservationist (“hands off ”) school of environmental response that perpetuates dualistic notions of nature, where nonhuman animals deserve to be at the top of the food chain and should be assured a plentiful and indefinite food source (either fish or junk food), but humans—as unnatural and “bad”—should not. As William Cronon argued in his famous essay a decade ago, “we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles [. . . thereby leaving] ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.”31 Backing the fishing trawlers out of the area does nothing to help change our relationship with the ocean ecosystem as a whole, nor does it educate us about sustainable fishing practices (or vegetarianism) more widely. Similarly, just because the animals in Over the Hedge have found enough food for one winter does not mean they will survive the next one now that the trees and bushes have been replaced with homes. When Hammy solves their food shortage problem by finding last summer’s nuts, we know the solution is a temporary one at best. There will be no more nuts to find next year. Another problem is that Happy Feet does not address the environmental damage the real animals represented by the computer-generated characters actually face: penguins are at risk because of global warming and reduced krill populations. The melting sea-ice is not mentioned

31 William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1996), 81.

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at all in the film, and in the final scene of the film, we see lots of ice and many penguins. Although the film shows the penguins eating and dependent on a large, shiny silver fish (perhaps mackerel, but it is not clear), in reality their greatest source of food is the less-attractive krill, a small shrimp-like crustacean. According to the Antarctic Krill Conservation Project, “Some scientists warn that the potential now exists for localized depletion of krill at levels that could seriously impact the entire southern marine ecosystem. These concerns have been made more urgent by global warming and by new technology that allows krill to be caught and pumped continuously out of the water and onto a vessel, where it can be processed immediately to prevent spoilage.”32 Krill are at risk from human overfishing because they are used to produce fish food and are valued for their oils, which are used in nutritional supplements.33 Happy Feet also argues that our recognition of another animal’s agency is vital to a change in human practices toward the environment, which suggests that this film and others like it continue to privilege the moment of eye contact, the recognition of another’s face, that we demand from our overly-humanized pets, for instance. While such recognition helps us to acknowledge another animal’s agency and subjectivity, when that moment requires a nonhuman animal to behave in human ways to get the attention of humans, there is no possibility for turning interactions with other animals into responsive engagements instead of reactive ones like we see here. I want to know how we can ethically relate to other creatures in ways that allow them to exist as more than simply mirrors of ourselves; this film especially, despite all the press about its progressive environmentalism, does not do that. The penguins are valued according to their placement on a human scale, and being worthy of protection is directly correlated with human interest, which is only sparked by their ability to “act human.” In contrast, the fish do not exist at all except as food, for example. Furthermore, the impact of that moment of recognition is disempowered when the problems in the film are solved before the credits roll. In Over the Hedge, the suburban animals’ agency is never recognized explicitly within the film—the tables are simply turned on the human 32

National Environmental Trust, “What are Krill?,” The Antarctic Krill Conservation Project, undated (accessed June 10, 2007). 33 National Environmental Trust, “Krill Count!,” The Antarctic Krill Conservation Project, undated (accessed June 10, 2007).

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antagonists so that they are caught in the traps set for the animals. At the end, with the traps removed but the suburbs still in place, the dilemma for the animals remains but is ignored. In both films, a temporary or partial solution (remove the fishing trawlers from the Antarctic; find Hammy’s lost nuts) pretends to have resolved the problem, allowing the theater-goer the opportunity to leave happy and satisfied—meaning that audiences leave the theaters without any call to environmental action at all. Thus, I am forced to conclude that these kinds of pseudoenvironmentalist films do little more than make us feel good. These films exploit current concerns about the environment and animal rights while simultaneously sanctioning our inaction in both cases. Environmental damage is not alleviated by dancing penguins or last year’s nuts, and the reassuring affirmation of the international political process is sadly ironic when we had a United States administration that blatantly opposed international environmental agreements. The movie industry’s desire for “happy endings” precludes the kind of ending that a genuinely environmentalist film would have—one that makes us rise and leave the theatre with a sense of urgency, a clearly defined action plan, and a desire to make a difference.

SECTION II

SPEAKING THROUGH ANIMALS

NO HUMAN HAND? THE OURANGOUTANG IN POE’S “THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE” Stephanie Rowe Endlessly functional, on its own or via the extensions of itself it uses to expand the range of its action upon the world, the human hand has been regarded since antiquity as a decisive marker in the differentiation of the human from all other animal species. For Aristotle the anatomical flexibility of the human hand made it the “instrument of instruments,” subsuming and superseding the analogous organs of all other animals in its capacity to function as talon, hoof, horn, sword, and spear “at will.” As the instrument of willed action born of the consciousness of a self that perceives itself in relation to the world, the hand is the symbol of an agency traditionally understood as exclusively human. But since the emergence of comparative anatomy in the late eighteenth century the idea of human uniqueness has been troubled by the physiological proximity of great apes, whose “instruments” differ from those of humans so slightly that these have only ever been classed as hands and not as paws. In the nineteenth century the proximity of ape and human anatomies, particularly those of the hands, threatened to undermine the notion of human exceptionality at its very core in assumptions regarding self-awareness and intentionality. Preservation of that exceptionalism, using scientific rather than metaphysical criteria, forced an awkward, and uncanny, question: when is a hand not a hand? The mystery in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) revolves decisively around this question: the killer is an orangutan finally identified as such by the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin from the print left on the neck of one of the murdered women, a clue disregarded as such by official police investigators, who assume it to be the print of a human hand. The rhetorical figures in the tale’s prefatory comments on games as proving grounds for analytical ability hint from the beginning that the hand will be the object. Here Poe’s narrator argues that the highest form of intellect is the ratiocinative, and that ratiocinative superiority is best demonstrated in the game of whist, which demands attentiveness to both the official aspects of the game, its

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rules and the sequence of play, and to the “manifold” and “multiform” contingencies external to the game itself, the signs transmitted by the other players’ bodies that reveal states of mind and suggest intention. These include the expressions on players’ faces and inadvertent speech, but also, and for Poe more significantly, the gestures of their hands: their “mode of assorting the cards in each hand,” their “manner of gathering up a trick,” the way a card “is thrown upon the table,” “the accidental dropping or turning of a card.”1 A few rounds having been played, the observant, ratiocinative analyst finds himself “in full possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforward puts down his cards with as absolute a precision of purpose as if the rest of the party had turned outward the faces of their own” (335–36). While the line tropes victory over an opponent in whist as a matter of taking possession of his hand, it also reveals that the moment of capture involves a shift from the literal, living hands playing the cards to the figural hand used as a term of art in card games. Victory in this prefatory parable, in other words, requires the transformation of living hands into the hand as figure, a subtle elision of the instrument of agency into a discursive artifact, an object rather than an agent. “The narrative which follows will appear to the reader somewhat in light of a commentary upon the propositions just advanced,” the preface concludes (336). The structure of that narrative, the tale of the murder case proper, is bifurcated. First, there is the plot, which is the epistemological process of resolving the details of the crime scene into clues leading to the identity of the criminal, related by an observing and marginally participant narrator, Dupin’s friend. Second, grafted onto the plot at the moment of recognition, is the story that affirms the correctness of that process, the full account of the commission of the crime, told by a second observing and marginally participant narrator, the orangutan’s owner, a sailor. In Todorov’s narratology this two-fold structure is not only a defining characteristic of classical detective fiction—a genre Poe is generally believed to have originated with this tale—but plot and story are, moreover, discontinuous, “two points of view about the same

1 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (New York: Penguin, 1945), 334–35. Further citations are noted in the text.

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thing.”2 In the case of the “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” while plot and story are joined in the resolution of the handprint into the speciesbeing of the killer, the apprehension of the hand making possible the apprehension of the ape, the narratives on either side of the handprint represent entirely different points of view on ontology and autonomy. In the plot, the mysterious being attached to the human-looking hand is resolved via reference to Georges Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom into an animal, itself a notion resolved upon the return to plot at the end of the sailor’s narrative into zoological specimen and commodity: upon the orangutan’s capture, the narrator of the detective plot tells us, its owner had “obtained for it a very large sum at the Jardin des Plantes” (375). But while the plot forecloses the possibilities of Being suggested by the indeterminate handprint, the story grafted onto it opens onto neither a specimen nor a commodity but an expressive and self-aware creature resisting subjugation and confinement in a deliberate, strategic attempt at self-determination. To a large extent that awareness and resistance is represented in the story through the orangutan’s hands—here plural, as living instruments of individual will. As the preface to the tale anticipates, the plot of the “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” elides the orangutan’s living hands, the instruments of his will, into a term of art in a zoological text, “animal,” that reduces the agent glimpsed in the story to the artifact at the Jardin des Plantes that concludes the narrative as a whole. From the point of view of the plot, human-animal difference resides in the question of intentional action. Dupin’s inquiry into the murders proceeds from the assumption that there was no motive behind them. As he points out, the fundamental error of the police investigation is the presumption that the spectacular atrocity of the murders (the throat of one of the victims is slashed so deeply that her head falls off during the recovery of her body, the other victim was strangled to death and her body shoved up a chimney) could only have been driven by some motive, the discovery of which will surely lead to the killer. For Dupin, though, the solution to the mystery lies precisely in “the startling absence of motive in a murder so singularly atrocious as this” (364). Both Dupin and the police equate motivated, intentional

2 Tzvetan Todorov, “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” in The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977), 44 and 46.

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action with the human. But while the police, assuming the presence of an intentional, and therefore human, actor see nothing unusual in the handprint on the neck of the second victim, Dupin, assuming none, reads the violence of the murders as inhuman brutality, and takes a closer look at the print.3 Reviewing with the narrator his analysis of the sub-mysteries affiliated with the mystery of the killer (his entrance and exit from the locked room, for instance), Dupin produces “a facsimile drawing of what has been described in one portion of the testimony as ‘dark bruises, and deep indentations of finger nails’ ” on the victim’s throat, “and in another . . . as a ‘series of livid spots, evidently the impression of fingers,’” and asks the narrator to measure his own hand against it (366): “This, I said, “is the mark of no human hand.” “Read now,” replied Dupin, “this passage from Cuvier.” It was a minute anatomical and generally descriptive account of the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands . . . “The description of the digits,” said I, as I made an end of reading, “is in exact accordance with this drawing. I see that no animal but an Ourang-Outang, of the species here mentioned, could have impressed the indentations as you have traced them . . .” (367)

The mysterious gap between the not-human and the animal is instantly and seamlessly closed with the introduction of the zoological treatise, the contents of which only supplement the designation “animal” inherent in the introduction of Cuvier by refining it into species. Dupin’s facsimile, a copy not of the handprint (itself a facsimile of the hand that left it) but of a text about the print, severs the sign of the actor from the actor himself, puts that sign into circulation as a clue, and grafts that clue onto a second text that points to an ourangutan. Through severance, circulation, and grafting, Dupin, like the ratiocinative whist player, takes possession of the figurative hand. The point of view of the story, on the other hand, exceeds its role in the plot as a corroboration of Dupin’s conclusion in its detailed account of the ape’s escape and subsequent actions. As represented

3 “Truth is not always in a well,” Dupin notes by way of critiquing police procedure; “In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe she is invariably superficial . . . By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought” (352). Accordingly, Dupin’s methodology in solving the mystery of the Rue Morgue killer demands separation of traces on the surface from the deep and perplexing problems of being and agency.

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in the sailor’s narrative, these actions are indicative of resistance and negotiation, evidence that complicates Dupin’s and the inspector’s assumptions regarding intentionality and calls into question the plot’s work of restoring the human order by establishing animal difference.4 Plot and story in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” with their respective points of view on intentionality and animal being, might be conceived in terms of Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert’s notion of “animal spaces” and “beastly places” within human geographies. In this model, “animal spaces” are human constructs such as the zoo to which Poe’s ape is dispatched in the plot, “special, enclosed, and policed enclaves” predicated on abstract systems of knowledge and classification: in so far as its object is knowledge of the orangutan in his class as “animal,” knowledge that restores order to the human world by containing the orangutan in his “natural” environment, the Jardin des Plantes, the plot of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” might be considered the animal space within the topography of Poe’s narrative.5 But if the space of the plot works to transform the mysterious killer into a passive artifact through knowledge and containment, in the story the agent of transformation is the ape himself, escaped from the sailor’s apartment and roaming the streets of Paris. The story of the ape grafted onto the tale of Dupin’s investigation in this sense constitutes what Philo and Wilbert identify as a “beastly place.” In accounts of animals who escape or evade the animal spaces created for them, they write, [I]t is animals themselves who inject what might be termed their own agency into the scene, thereby transgressing, perhaps even resisting, the human placements of them. It might be said that in so doing the animals

4 This reading has been most influentially advanced by John Irwin in The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). “Poe’s underlying project in the Dupin stories,” writes Irwin, “is the analysis of self-consciousness within the larger project of differentiating the human” (xvii). In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” this project is explicitly articulated as a differentiation of the human from the animal, Irwin argues. 5 Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, “Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: An Introduction,” in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations, ed. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (London: Routledge, 2000), 13. Because zoos are specifically for animals, Philo and Wilbert note, many people since their emergence in the nineteenth century have had a tendency “to ‘naturalise’ the zoo in the sense of accepting it unproblematically as an appropriate location for many animals” (13). That gesture of naturalization is evident in the nonchalance of Poe’s narrator’s comment as the sailor finishes speaking, presented as an aside, that he has “scarcely anything to add. The Ourang-Outang . . . was subsequently caught by the owner himself, who obtained for it a very large sum at the Jardin des Plantes. Le Bon [a suspect] was instantly released . . .” and so forth (375).

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stephanie rowe begin to forge their own ‘other spaces’, countering the proper places stipulated for them by humans, thus creating their own ‘beastly places’ reflective of their own ‘beastly’ ways, ends, doings, joys, and sufferings.6

As a chronicle of resistance to capture and renegotiation of humananimal interaction, the beastly place of the story becomes an uncanny presence in the plot, generating, in Philo and Wilbert’s phrase, the “deep unease” for which Poe’s tales are famous.7 The story of the orangutan opens, however, not with resistance or evident effort to create a beastly place out of human space, but with what seems to be instead an effort to adopt the human ways of the human space in which he finds himself. Having broken out of the closet to which he’d been confined while a wound in his foot incurred on the ship from Borneo to Paris heals and he becomes fit for sale (a detail that immediately differentiates the ape’s hands from its prehensile feet), the orangutan is discovered by the sailor seated in front of a mirror, “Razor in hand, and fully lathered, . . . attempting the operation of shaving” (372). Poe’s tantalizingly allegorical image of an ape seated before a mirror has elicited copious discussion.8 But trying to see the orangutan’s story apart from its own captivity within the plot, before the elision of the living being into the plot’s zoological and commercial artifact, the interpretation of the ape’s imitation of the act of shaving, “in which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the key-hole of the closet,” demands that we resist the temptation to contain it in allegory, a move that retraces the plot’s transformation of being into figure or artifact. Instead, the point of view of the story suggests that, to the ape, the act is neither symbolic nor arbitrary but in fact is significant simply as praxis: as the rehearsal of an activity characteristic of the creature occupying the position of power in the orangutan’s world, the imitation of the gestures of shaving suggests an attempt to obtain power—to become his own master.9 Rather than forging his own “beastly place” with its own beastly point of view, the orangutan at this initial stage in the story seeks accommodation outside of the 6

Philo and Wilbert, 14. Ibid., 23. 8 See for example Irwin’s Mystery to a Solution. 9 Noting that the sailor likely would have shaved before leaving the apartment, Charles Rzepka is the most recent reader to suggest that the act might also have signified to the ape freedom as well as mastery, representing, as Rzepka puts it, “the need to be recognized as human, the assertion of a claim to the freedom enjoyed by the orangutan’s master.” Charles Rzepka, Detective Fiction (Malden, MA: Polity, 2002), 85. 7

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“animal space” of the closet in the human space of his captor’s apartment by emulating the specifically human ways of that space. This is not, of course, how the sailor sees it: his first thought upon entering the apartment and finding the orangutan at the shaving mirror is for the “dangerous weapon” in the ape’s hand, in spite of the orangutan’s handling of the razor in a traditional manner and the lack of evidence that would indicate that he too recognizes its potential as a weapon, and for his remarkable proficiency in using it (372). “Terrified” by what he presumes to be the orangutan’s intent, the sailor reaches for the whip he uses “to quiet the creature” (373); the ape, who unlike the sailor recognizes real intent with a dangerous weapon when he sees it, responds by leaving the scene rather than responding to the sailor’s threatened violence in kind. The departure from the sailor’s apartment marks a turning point in the orangutan’s relationship to the human environment in which he finds himself: instead of seeking accommodation in human spaces by simply emulating the practices associated with them, the ape from this point forward asserts his own point of view and (until this program goes badly awry) seeks to transform human spaces, where the animal is contained and sequestered, into shared “beastly places” without inter-species violence and domination. The narrative foregrounds the orangutan’s hands as the instruments of this attempted transformation, calling attention to their activity in the ape’s efforts to communicate and pacify. Specifically, the ape’s hands communicate, or attempt to communicate, through gesture as the sailor pursues him through Paris, and to pacify as he uses them to groom the shrieking Madame L’Espanaye in whose bedroom he seeks refuge. As with the encounter in the sailor’s apartment where the story begins, however, in these latter two cases the intentions signaled by the hands are disregarded or misinterpreted by their human audiences. In the first, the sailor follows the orangutan as, “razor still in hand,” it makes its way through the streets of Paris, “occasionally stopping to look back and gesticulate at its pursuer, until the latter had nearly come up with it” (373). From the account in the sailor’s narrative it seems clear enough that these gesticulations, despite their being made while holding onto the razor, which the orangutan does not put to use as a weapon until much later, are the iconic motions for “stop” or “go away.” That the orangutan stops to perform them despite the risk to himself as the sailor nearly catches up with him underscores his desire not just to escape but to re-negotiate the relationship between the sailor and himself, changing

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the terms from master and fugitive to those of sovereign beings with divergent interests. The sailor’s refusal to respond to the orangutan’s gestures are indicative of his commitment to his own interest in the ape as property, but also suggests that the sailor doubts the signs worked by the orangutan’s hands as signs, willed expressions of individual sovereignty in negotiation with what the ape, for one, recognizes as another individual sovereignty. But while the gestures of the ape do not signify to the sailor or cause him to hesitate in his pursuit, the transparency of his narration reveals more about the ape’s intentions than the sailor himself perceives.10 The emphasis on gesture in the chase scene in the middle of the sailor’s story constitutes a particularly acute discrepancy between the points of view of story and plot in Poe’s tale. Here, in spite of the sailor’s inability to recognize it, the orangutan’s hands operate through gesture as instruments of communication that can influence others and alter the course of events. In the plot, on the other hand, the orangutan’s only known mode of communication is vocal, a register that depends on spoken language. Here, the unidentified killer’s voice, emanating from the interior of the house of the murdered women and overheard by several people in the vicinity, is believed by the police, the public, and, for a time, Dupin to be a key clue in the mystery. Witnesses outside the building report “two voices in loud and angry contention” (346), one of which speaks French, the second of which, described variously as “shrill” or “gruff,” is thought by each hearer to have been speaking a different, unfamiliar language. Police investigators are baffled by the conundrum of the second speaker, but Dupin eventually realizes that it is not the case that the voice is speaking a foreign language, but rather that it is foreign to language altogether. As he unfolds this deduction for the benefit of the narrator, the narrator exclaims that the second speaker, uttering nonsense, must be a madman; “In some respects,” Dupin tells him before noting that even madmen produce words belonging to some language, “your idea is not irrelevant” (366). What are the respects in which the class of beings called “animal” might be

10 The mode of the story, says Todorov, is that of an artless reality, “what has happened in real life” presented in the way that events unfold in our own lives, while the mode of the plot, conversely, lies in the author’s strategic presentation of causes and effects through elisions, inversions, and other “literary devices” (45). The sailor’s transparency reflects the reality mode of story, the sleights-of-hand in the plot (below), the literary.

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placed in the same category as the insane? Reinforcing his belief that the killer acted without motive or intention, Dupin’s assumption here appears to be that, like the “incoherent . . . words” of a madman, animal expressions are not the manifestations of a reasoning mind.11 Yet the point of view afforded by the story, where the orangutan’s gestures clearly do communicate reasoned thought that desires to produce effects in other reasoning minds (even if those minds do not recognize that communication as such) calls this assumption into question by shifting the locus of signification from the voice to the hand. The division in the narrative between the two points of view on language and intentionality reflects the divergent points of view on the nature of sign language in Poe’s day. The idea that sign language might constitute not just a linguistically whole and legitimate language but could also be a sort of “natural language” gained currency in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century and in America shortly thereafter. In 1817, French linguist Roch-Ambroise Bébian repudiated efforts to transcribe alphabetic forms into a system of hand signals, arguing that hand signs conceived independently of written shapes could more effectively be used to represent ideas both concrete and abstract. Bébian’s work eventually revolutionized deaf education in both France and America. Poe, an omnivorous reader with a special interest in science, would conceivably have had at least a cursory familiarity with these developments and their controversial implications for the assumed correlation between speech and language. These came to fruition in mid-twentieth century linguistics research with the notion that sign language, as it had evolved since Bébian’s day, is in fact governed by a visual-spatial grammatical structure analogous to the structure of spoken and written language.12 Neurologist Frank Wilson’s The Hand: How its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture considers the rediscovery of Bébian’s theories in the 1960s and their extension in contemporary linguistics into a thesis on “the gestural basis for the

11 “Without language, whatever creature had uttered such sounds and brutally killed the two women is exiled from the human species and ceases, in its apparent motivelessness, to be a responsible agent.” Frank Lawrence, Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2003), 39. 12 Frank Wilson, The Hand: How its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (New York: Vintage, 1998), 198–99.

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deep structure of language” itself.13 While Wilson excludes apes’ hands from the discussion of the human hand and its connection to language on anatomical grounds in the early pages of the book, the argument of its central chapter, “The Articulate Hand,” examines gesture as a “(re)discovered alternative to the vocal apparatus in language output” and, conversely, posits a correlation between language capability and praxis.”14 The so-called language clue in Poe’s plot in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” rehearses the traditional correlation between speech and, as Dupin puts it, “syllabification” (366), but the story attached to the plot, by displacing the question of articulation from speech to gesture, echoes the new alternative perspective on sign language as a visual-spatial language distinct from, but analogous to, the “syllabification” of speech. In Poe’s hands, the debate becomes explicitly linked to the question of human difference. His efforts to communicate with the sailor proving futile, the orangutan finally abandons his course through the dark Parisian streets and seeks refuge in a fourth story apartment. It was 3:00 a.m., the sailor notes; what seems to have attracted the ape to this particular apartment was “a light gleaming from the open window,” a detail that suggests that the entry into the apartment is not simply a reaction, an impulse to hide, in which case any room in any building would do, but the deliberate choice of an inhabited space where he might find assistance (373). Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye are terrified, of course, when the creature swings through their window on a shutter and lands in their bedroom; the elder screams while the younger faints. Yet the orangutan’s actions in the room, observed by the sailor who watches from outside and recounts the events in his transparent narrative, demonstrate that his intention is to establish solidarity, an intentionality again communicated through the activities of his hands: grabbing Madame L’Espanaye by the hair, which she’d been combing, 13 Ibid., 201. Wilson summarizes the mounting evidence for “a gestural basis for the deep structure of language” and the reconsideration of the relationship between thought and action already taking place as a result. The location of the hand as the generative site of linguistic capability, Wilson notes, “would forge a powerful conceptual link between gesture and praxis” (201). (Gesture, he notes, is linguistically defined as “an equivalence class of coordinated movements that achieve some end,” a sense that already implies a degree of praxis [203]). Certainly the motions of the hands of Poe’s ape are intended towards a particular end; their failure to achieve that end lies in their recipient’s failure to either recognize them as gestures or, if he does recognize them, his refusal to comply with the request they communicate. 14 Ibid., 197.

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the orangutan begins “flourishing the razor about her face, in imitation of the motions of a barber” (374). Rough, desperate, and understandably horrifying for Mdm. L’Espanaye, the bizarre gesture goes beyond mere mimicry; instead it is adaptive, a transference of the solitary human ritual, which he would associate with the L’Espanayes, onto the cultural practice in primate societies of mutual grooming as a means of soothing tensions and affirming community. Again, and here especially, the orangutan’s actions are proactive, an effort to influence behavior and steer the course of events, rather than reactive. In Philo and Wilbert’s terms, this hybrid of human and primate rituals that signify and affirm identity within their respective cultures suggest the desire to transform the inevitably human space of the city apartment into a new kind of environment, a “beastly place” of inter-species reciprocity and solidarity. In this case the fact that the grooming rituals of both species are activities of the hand, independent of speech or vocalization, is significant: if the linguistic thesis on gesture as the basis of verbal language is correct, the orangutan’s hybridized gesture of grooming links the human and the primate at the site of their common denominator, the “beastly place” of their ancient kinship. Even the sailor, safely removed from the scene on the other side of the window, recognizes “the probably pacific purposes of the OurangOutang,” noticing perhaps for the first time that the ape wields the razor as a grooming instrument rather than a weapon (374). It is within this very sentence, however, that the intentional actions of the orangutan are suspended in a rush of violent reaction (similar to the sailor’s as he reaches for his whip upon first sight of the ape with “razor in hand”), the effects of which are what render the crime so inhumanly brutal: The screams and struggles of the old lady . . . had the effect of changing the probably pacific purposes of the Ourang-Outang into those of wrath. With one determined sweep of its muscular arm it nearly severed her head from her body. The sight of blood inflamed its anger into phrenzy. Gnashing its teeth, and flashing fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl, and imbedded its fearful talons in her throat, retaining its grasp until she expired. (374)

The orangutan’s hands become animalized as “talons” at the point where, “inflamed” as he is into a “phrenzy,” they cease to function as the instruments or agents of his deliberate will: in the absence of intent, action takes place mechanistically, as instinct, for example, and works towards no particular outcome, the effects of actions without objective being incidental to activity rather than directing it. His actions now

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driven by fear, as pure reaction, rather than motivated by the will to produce an intended effect, the orangutan ceases in this passage to function as an agent; concomitantly, the treatment of the orangutan’s hands in sailor’s story shifts from the literal to the figurative. On the narratological level, it is precisely at the site of this loss of agency that Dupin nabs his culprit: the mark of these “fearful talons” on the second victim’s throat constitutes the exact point of intersection between story and plot in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by confirming that the “bruises, and deep indentations” and “series of livid spots” described in the coroner’s testimony and traced by Dupin into the shape of a hand are, indeed, the marks “of finger nails” and “the impression of fingers” (366). In the return to the plot that follows this revelation—“I have scarcely anything to add” (375)—the living hands of the ape that marked him as a creature of will and agency in the sailor’s story become the artifact of the “fac-simile drawing” of the traces of his fingerprints and the zoological text.15

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The sailor’s story concludes with the orangutan, having killed the women, noticing the sailor watching through the window. “The fury of the beast, who no doubt bore still in mind the dreaded whip, was instantly converted into fear,” the sailor recalls; “Conscious of having deserved punishment, it seemed desirous of concealing its bloody deeds” and so shoves the body of the younger woman up the chimney and throws the body of the elder out of the window. The sailor, likewise, “dreading the consequences of the butchery,” flees the scene (375). He will later be tracked down by Dupin who finds his hair ribbon at the scene. Remarking the assumption in Lacan and in the history of western thought in general that “the animal”—all species of non-human animals that are gathered under this generic term—lacks sufficient awareness of self and Other to cover its tracks or erase its traces, Jacques Derrida observes that in the effort to erase one’s traces one becomes the subject of a signifier, and therefore also “a subjecting subject, a subject as master, an active and deciding subject of the signifier.” Derrida rejects the categorical denial of this capacity to all species known as “animal,” and wonders whether the human can be categorically said to have it either. “Were we even to suppose,” he asks, “that the ‘animal’ were incapable of covering its tracks, by what right could one concede that power to the human, to the ‘subject of the signifier’” as agent? Certainly in the case of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the orangutan’s “conscious[ness] of having deserved punishment” and his effort to conceal the traces of his crime show him not only aware of his relationship to the signifying trace but also actively working to eradicate them. In this he in fact goes a step further than the human who finds himself implicated in the crime, who makes no such effort, and in fact gives himself away. Finally, it is worth noting in support of Derrida’s query that the genre of detective fiction would not exist if humans truly could erase their traces—and that the “animal” culprit in the inaugural text in that genre makes more of an effort to do so than his human accomplice. Jacques Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded?,” in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2003), 132 and 138.

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The process of that transformation from the living of hands of the agent revealed in the sailor’s story into the textual and zoological artifact captured by Dupin—the triumphant player at whist who takes “full possession of the contents of each hand”—is one of severance, circulation, and grafting. From the traces left on the neck of the second victim, the hand of the killer is reconstructed as an idea that, disarticulated from the living hands, is put into circulation as a clue in the form of Dupin’s “fac-simile drawing.” The severance of the hand from the body of the killer makes it, for the time of the investigation, a signifier without a referent, circulating between Dupin and the narrator. While the irreducible orangutan revealed in the sailor’s story haunts the narrative as a whole as the trace of the once-living being transmuted into artifact by the plot, the severed hand making its rounds between Dupin and the narrator as they handle it this way and that in an effort to come to grips with its meaning, to attach it to a meaningful referent, becomes the site of the tale’s uncanny, building in tension until the plot’s resolution in identification. Pointing out that his drawing “gives the idea of a firm and fixed hold” in which “each finger has retained” its “fearful grasp,” Dupin hands it to the narrator and instructs him to place his own hand over it, his fingers “in the respective impressions” traced upon the paper (366). Strangely, the narrator cannot. Dupin suggests that laying the print out flat might be skewing the measurements and produces a billet of wood about the same circumference as a human throat, and advises the narrator to wrap the drawing around the log and “try the experiment again.” “The difficulty was even more obvious than before,” says the narrator, the sense of strangeness mounting as he recalls the disjuncture and disorientation of this moment: how could two hands, one wonders in the gap, be so dramatically incommensurate? Twice the narrator has laid his hand over the severed hand of the print, attempting to fuse them in a rapport of being; twice he confronts the distance between himself as human and this human-like other of the facsimile print. “This,” he exclaims with bristling horror, “is the mark of no human hand” (367). No longer is the detective plot merely dealing with brutal violence and baffling clues. The production and circulation of the drawing of the hand opens the dimension of the uncanny in the text, where the familiar registers simultaneously as familiar and foreign, alien by virtue of the residue of the sameness that only makes the foreign all the more unfathomable. The effect of this uncanny—this aporia between the human, signified by the narrator’s hand, which becomes the very

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sign of his humanity in the difference, and the non-human, which is not at this point an animal or a machine or a ghost—is to open up the possibility for being, prior to the not-human hand’s attachment to a body reducible to its kingdom, phylum, genus, and, most importantly, since this is where the crucial distinction lies, its species. “Read now,” says Dupin, moving possibility to resolution, “this passage from Cuvier” (367). Where the human hand laid over the drawing of the print failed to produce a knowable identity, the layering of the zoological text (“The description of the digits” in Cuvier “is in exact accordance with this drawing”) over the detached hand of Dupin’s facsimile produces “the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands.” From Georges Cuvier’s Le règne animal to the Jardin des Plantes, the site of Cuvier’s zoological research in comparative anatomy (his brother, Frédéric Cuvier, was the park’s director for thirty years) is but a short step, interrupted only by the sailor’s story. In her study of the trope of the dead hand in Renaissance drama and American gothic fiction, Katherine Rowe traces the process by which the dead, severed hand becomes an artifact mediating between the body and the material world of objects it originally, as a living hand, created and manipulated. Noting that since its Aristotelian formulation as the “instrument of instruments” the hand has been regarded as “the special embodiment of the human ability to manufacture and control the material world,” Rowe observes that severance “relocates this part in that material, instrumental world.”16 In the circulation of the hand from the body into the “world of made things,” writes Rowe, the body imagined in relation to that hand is itself “reconceived as artifactual,” calling into question the embodied self ’s capacity for willed, self-authorizing action.17 In their “tenuous, prosthetic” relation to the body and the self, she adds, severed hands circulate as signs of an effaced identity, to ghostly or uncanny effect.18 In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” the orangutan’s hands become artifactual in the reconstruction of its hand from verbal descriptions of his fingerprints in Dupin’s drawing. With the Cuvier text layered over that drawing, in place of the narrator’s human hand, the artifact of the mysterious hand of the killer is grafted onto the killer’s now16

Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), 4. 17 Ibid., 10. 18 Ibid., 4.

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known body, rendering it, too, artifactual: an object precisely identified not only by species but sub-species, a commodity for sale that, once sold, can be put to use for popular exhibition and scientific research. As Donna Haraway notes in Primate Visions—not just about the discipline of primatology but the biological sciences in general—traditional scientific methodology Turns everything into a resource for appropriation. As a “resource” an object of knowledge is finally only matter for the seminal power, the act of the knower, but any status as agent in the productions of knowledge must be denied the object. It—the world—must, in short, be objectified as a thing, not agent; it must be matter for the self-formation of the only social being in the productions of knowledge, the human knower.19

Yet as Haraway also finds, while primates are constructed in the biological narratives about them as passive objects of knowledge, they also actively influence those narratives, taking a role in their “authorship”: “I want to find a concept for telling a history of science that does not depend on the dualism between active and passive, culture and nature, human and animal, social and natural,” she writes.20 While the detective plot of Poe’s tale casts its primate as object without agency, plot and story taken together tell the kind of history Haraway searches for, one that undermines the dualisms that mark an absolute difference between the human and all other animals, denying agency and legitimating the myriad forms of domination to which non-human animals become subject. In this case—as in Katherine Rowe’s dead hand narratives—the tale is a type of ghost story, haunted by the effaced other whose hand (the hand that authors the killings that puts the plot in motion) circulates, as a trace and a tracing, and recalls the living hands of the creature irreducible to its later status as artifact. In an 1836 review of Peter Roget’s Animal and Vegetable Physiology, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, the fifth Bridgewater Treatise, Poe remarked in passing that Sir Charles Bell, author of the fourth, had perhaps written “the worst of the Treatises.”21 Bell, a London anatomist, surgeon, and vivisector (he also wrote a history of facial expressions in painting) had produced The Hand, its Mechanism 19 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the Modern World (New York: Routledge, 1989), 13. 20 Ibid., 8. 21 Edgar Allan Poe, “Roget’s Physiology,” Southern Literary Messenger, February 1836, 202.

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and Vital Endowment, as Evincing Design in 1833; an American edition appeared three years later. The Bridgewater Project, conceived by the Earl of Bridgewater in 1829 in response to growing speculation in the scientific community regarding the possibility that species evolve from common ancestors over time, was intended to prove that organisms were originally designed by God as perfect and that no evolution had taken place or would ever need to.22 Despite objections to some of the finer points of the commission of the project, Poe seems to have endorsed its general idea and purpose. But why did he feel Bell’s treatise on the hand was the worst of the series? Poe did not publish a review of Bell, and the Roget review gives no indication of the grounds for his complaint against him. He does complain of Roget, however, that his study excludes analysis of animal and plant structures whose “relation to final causes,” in Roget’s own words, “cannot be traced.”23 In other words, writes Poe, Roget “has admitted such facts alone as afford palpable evidence of Almightly design.”24 Perhaps Poe felt that Bell’s explicit definition of the hand “as belonging exclusively to man—corresponding in its sensibility and motion with the endowments of his mind” was similarly spurious, particularly in Bell’s dismissal of the hands of primates as being functionally undifferentiated from their feet.25 (Poe himself is careful to differentiate the two in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” with the note on the orangutan’s injured foot.) Is “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” published in 1841, Poe’s response to Bell? Although the hypothesis is tenuous at best, the depiction of the orangutan’s hands in the story presents evidence of the agency Bell

22 Poe cites the agenda of the Treastises, as printed in the Preface to each: Th e president of the Royal Society of London should appoint (with a handsome stipend) experts to “write, print and publish, one thousand copies of a work, On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation; illustrating such work by all reasonable arguments, as, for instance, the variety and formation of God’s creatures, in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; the effect of digestion, and thereby of conversion; the construction of the hand of man, and an infinite variety of other arguments; as also by discoveries ancient and modern, in arts, sciences, and the whole extent of literature” (203). 23 Quoted in Poe, “Roget’s,” 203. 24 Ibid., 203. 25 Charles Bell, The Hand, its Mechanism and Vital Endowment, as Evincing Design (London: William Pickering, 1837), 19. Elibron Classics Replica Edition, Adamant Media Corporation, 2004.

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credits to the human hand alone,26 though the combined effect of plot and story is less a rebuttal of Bell than a representation of his thesis and the disregarded evidence that haunts it. For anatomist-philosophers of the hand like Bell, Wilson, and Dupin, the problem of the non-human primate hand can be summarily dispensed with: human and ape hands look superficially similar, but the different ratios of fingers to palms, for example, suffice to exclude the non-human primate as a being of will and agency. (Wilson, for instance, points out that the difference in bone structure between apes and humans creates differences in grip posture and precision. His thesis is that the hand influences neurological development in humans; that the different anatomical structures of apes’ hands, resulting in differences in grip posture and position, creates different neurological structures in the non-human primate brain is assumed rather than addressed.) In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin’s differentiation of the human from the “animal” via the gap between the narrator’s hand and the edges of the hand traced in the facsimile brings the tale to conclusion, but it is a conclusion undermined by the failure of that experiment to quite resolve the gestural hands of the ape in the sailor’s story, and the expressive creature attached to them, into Dupin’s zoological artifact. The discovery of anatomical-ontological difference and its subsequent disruption by the ambivalent primate hand that surfaces in the interstices of the text’s discursive logic, no doubt repeated in innumerable texts in the history of the subject, is echoed a century after Poe in Heidegger’s discussion of the hand and human difference in What is Called Thinking. Jacques Derrida’s careful reading of this text reveals the humanist elision of the problem of non-human primate hands and its destabilizing potential for the Heideggerean ideal of the Geschlecht—in this case the human community defined and bound together through its essential capacity for producing itself as an idea, crafted and circulated in poetic and philosophical thought. For Heidegger the essential difference of the human hand lies not in its grasp, a merely biological function, but in its expressive capability, its ability to give itself to another in a clasp, or the gift of a made thing, or gesture, or writing. The works of the hand, like speech, are expressions of the mind; the mind itself is 26

“The human hand is so beautifully formed, it has so fine a sensibility, that sensibility governs its motions so correctly, every effort of the will is answered so instantly, as if the hand itself were the seat of that will,” Bell observes in his introduction (16).

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formed by the works of the hand. “Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself,” says Heidegger, “through the element of thinking . . . All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking.”27 Inevitably, like the anatomist-philosophers of the hand before and after him, Heidegger has to confront the problem of the non-human primate. The stakes are high: the very essence of the Geschlecht rests on the unique capabilities of the human hand; the hand of the ape, if clear difference is not established, undermines the categorical separation of the human from all other animal species. And so: “Apes,” says Heidegger, “have organs that can grasp, but they have no hand.”28 For Derrida, the statement, which appears in the text without analysis or contextualization, only rehearses the conventional wisdom of humanist discourse, a serious misstep in a text on the highest orders of thinking, creative and philosophical, beyond merely computational thought. “Like most of those who, as philosophers or persons of good sense, speak of animality, Heidegger takes no account of a certain ‘zoological knowledge’ that accumulates, is differentiated, and becomes more refined concerning what is brought together under this so general and confused word animality,” writes Derrida; “He does not criticize it and does not even examine the sorts of presuppositions, metaphysical or otherwise, it can harbor. [It is a] non-knowing raised to a tranquil knowing, then exhibited as an essential proposition about the essence of the ape’s prehensile organs.”29 The assumed difference, Derrida shows, lies in the human hand’s essentially human activity of giving, an activity believed alien to the non-human paw, talon, claw, etc., which can only take. Derrida wonders in a footnote to the essay whether the real difference is not between the human’s giving and the animal’s taking but between the human’s giving and taking “as such” and the animal’s giving and taking, without consciousness and intentionality of giving and taking “as such.”30 Derrida’s own distinction here, it seems to me, which also appears to deny “the animal” agency, is itself overly fine and unsubstantiated, which is perhaps the reason it is relegated to a footnote. Certainly it is difficult to see the gestures of the orangutan 27 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). Qtd. in Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” trans. John P. Leavy, Jr., in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1985), 175. 28 Qouted in Derrida, “Geschlecht II,” 173. 29 Ibid., 173. 30 Ibid., 195, n. 20.

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in the sailor’s account of the chase through Paris and the efforts and disasters inside the L’Espanaye apartment as gifts of communication and community but not “as such”: what, in these scenes, would “as such” even look like? Establishing the nature of apes’ hands is not Derrida’s point in this essay, at any rate. Rather, here, as in so many of Derrida’s works, implicitly or explicitly, the question of the animal functions as “the essential axiomatic” of a thinker’s discourse; in Heidegger’s discussion of the Geschlecht that question—the problem of the ape’s hand raised and dismissed without, says Derrida, so much as a thought—is the fault line of the metaphysical humanism Heidegger tries to avoid.31 Later, in a period where Derrida’s writing becomes more deliberately focused on this axiomatic, he notes two fundamentally opposed types of discourses on animality. The first, that of science and philosophy, observes and speaks of non-human animals but has no engagement with or experience of them, and thus can only position them as the passive objects of theoretical knowledge, blind to the animals’ own processes of coming to know them. Practitioners in these disciplines see animals, he notes, but do not see that they are also seen by them. While they ignore the fact that the animal could “address them,” however, this is also something they know, instinctively if not scientifically, and, because this knowledge exceeds their systems of knowing, try to hide; the gestures of their hiding—their elisions and figures and even logical sleights-ofhand—are the foundational symptoms of their conceptualizations of the human.32 The second type of discourse is that of the prophets and the poets, whose epistemes are formed by vision and the experience of being in the world with these non-human others, “in the being-with shared by man and by what man calls the animal”; recognizing that modes of consciousness, desire, and suffering transcend species boundaries, says Derrida, the poets and prophets refuse to disavow the active roles animals play in the shaping of our shared worlds.33 In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” plot and story, though they intersect, operate like the discourses of philosophy and poetry in Derrida on separate planes of awareness. Like Heidegger’s, Dupin’s resolution of the problem of the ambiguity of the ape’s hand into the 31

Ibid., 173. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills (Critical Inquiry 28:2, 2002), 382–83. 33 Ibid., 393. 32

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idea of the animal is also a sort of “non-knowing raised to a tranquil knowing, then exhibited as an essential proposition about the essence of the ape’s prehensile organs”: although the plot ostensibly takes account of the zoological knowledge of the time, and indeed turns on it, it misrepresents that knowledge by implying that the Cuvier text contains a “description of the digits” commensurate with Dupin’s drawing, when in fact Cuvier’s account of the ape’s hands lacks the detail and measurement necessary for such a confirmation. (Nor in Cuvier is the orangutan represented as the creature of “wild ferocity” the narrator reports; instead, for Cuvier, the orangutan is an animal known for its gentleness and tractability.)34 Without the narratological sleight-of-hand the Cuvier text would leave open the mystery at the center of Poe’s plot; with it, that mystery is elided into its solution, a not-knowing made into knowing and then exhibited as the essential proposition on which rests the plot’s conclusion: the ape as artifact, a market commodity and zoological object. The sailor’s story in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” on the other hand, despite the fact that the sailor is the actual agent of the ape’s ownership and sale (though not his ontological determination, which falls to Dupin), offers what Derrida might describe as the more poetic discourse on the orangutan, a discourse that, for all its tension, is based on his experience of beingwith that creature. The orangutan represented in the sailor’s story never quite reduces to the zoological object of the plot, but remains instead to some degree separate from it; in this way, while the story affirms the plot, it also remains an unsettled and unsettling presence in it, the site of its uncanny, preserving the mystery the sleight-of-hand with the Cuvier text would hide. The narrative gesture of elision might be considered, as Derrida suggests, a symptom of Poe’s humanism. Yet the story grafted onto that scene might also be symptomatic—in this case of a more fluid sense of the human, one without categorical ontological 34 Baron Georges Cuvier, The Animal Kingdom, Arranged According to its Organization, Serving as a Foundation for the Natural History of Animals and an Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, trans. M. Latreille (London, 1834), 47–48. From Cuvier Poe might have taken for his tale the information that the orangutan’s “body is covered with a coarse red hair” (found clutched in the hands of one of the victims), that his vocal apparatus produces a “a hoarseness of his voice,” and that they are found in particular on the island of Borneo (48). Of the hands Cuvier notes only that on the orangutan “the hinder thumbs are very short compared with the toes,” a comparison Dupin does not make (48). The mode of the plot, says Todorov, above, is that of “literary devices,” elisions and inversions, in contradistinction to the artless reality that is the mode of the story.

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difference from “the animal” in general. The uncanny presence of the story in Poe’s plot undoes its philosophical dualisms—“between active and passive, culture and nature, human and animal, social and natural,” as Haraway puts it. The ambiguity is axiomatic in Poe, the dogmatic certainty of human difference claimed by Bell and echoed by Heidegger replaced by the haunting specter of the ape’s hands, irreducible, in the end, to their facsimile artifact.

SLED DOGS OF THE AMERICAN NORTH: ON MASCULINITY, WHITENESS, AND HUMAN FREEDOM Rebecca Onion The saga of the working sled dog in Alaska came to an end with a gala media event, made possible by three things: a nineteenth-century frontier disaster, twentieth-century modern communications and medicine, and the legendary pluck of a dog named Balto. In January of 1925, winter ice on Norton Sound had long since formed, freezing Nome, Alaska (situated right next to the Arctic Circle) into its winter isolation. The former gold rush town of 1,430 people lay inaccessible to the outside world, save for one method of communication—the telegraph line, which the Army Signal Corps had established in the early part of the century—and one method of transport: the dog sled. That January, the only doctor in Nome, Curtis Welch, found that the diphtheria antitoxin serum he had ordered from the continental US had not arrived. Soon enough he started getting patients with signs of the disease. Welch telegrammed the public health department in Washington and asked them for help. In all of Alaska, officials could only find about a third of the amount of serum that Dr. Welch needed to save the town. The stage was set for the drama that followed. Some, including Nome’s mayor and Alaska’s territorial representative, advocated sending an airplane from Fairbanks, but the governor, Scott Bone, did not trust that the airplane would make it and decided to rely on the old-time technology of dog sleds.1 Bone put together a relay race

1

Coverage of the debate regarding the sending of an airplane from Fairbanks can be found in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, edited and written by W. F. Thompson, an Alaska “booster” who was firmly against the decision to put together a dog relay, arguing that territorial pride was at stake, and that Alaska should show herself “ready to move from the dog-team stage to the airship class”. See W. F. Thompson, “When You Are ‘Called’ You Have To ‘Go,’ Yet What Better Can Any Man Do Than Give His Efforts To The Relief Of Friends In The Friendly Northland?”, Fairbanks Daily NewsMiner, January 26, 1925; Thompson, “Nome Is Certainly Up Against It, With Several Deaths More Cases Appearing Daily, No Anti-Toxin And Only One Overworked Doctor To Save The Camp An Epidemic”, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner January 27, 1925; Thompson, “When Comes From The Far Places The Cry For Help When Death And Disease Menace There That Call Rings Around The World And Brings The Response”,

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that would bring the serum from Nenana, an interior town which was the last one reachable by railroad, overland to Nome, about six hundred miles. The trip usually took fifteen days. Twenty expert mushers, with twenty different teams of dogs, did it in five and a half.2 Correspondents in Nome fed news back to their papers by wireless and telegraph, and over the five-day journey, newspapers across the country covered the serum run step by step. The Nome radio station was ordered to be kept open 24 hours a day, because, said the Nome Daily Nugget, “due to the increased business engendered by the diphtheria epidemic, the number of messages being received and sent [is] running into the hundreds daily.”3 The tremendous appeal of the story about the tiny northern town and its children saved by hearty dog heroes stemmed from a potent mixture: one part conservative celebration of frontier masculinity, and one part exultation in the medical achievements of modern society. Citizens thrilled to see diphtheria—a disease that killed many children every year prior to the end of the nineteenth century, and that had only recently become curable—roundly beaten, even at the apparent ends of the earth. After the serum had reached Nome, the New York Sun’s editorial page wrote, “Science made the antitoxin that is in Nome today, but science could not get it there. All the mechanical transportation marvels of modern times faltered in the presence of the elements . . . Other engines might freeze and choke, but that oldest of motors, the heart, whose fuel is blood and whose spark is courage, never stalls but once.”4 The dogs and men of the serum run embodied an appealing mix of modern achievement and ancient virtue. (Similar patterns can be seen in the celebrity of Charles Lindbergh, who made his trans-Atlantic flight two years after the serum run.)5 The appeal of these heroes, as Roderick Nash argues in his re-conception of the

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, January 28, 1925; Thompson, “Gone To The Dogs, Again”, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, January 28, 1925. 2 See Gay and Laney Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003) for a well-researched and comprehensive chronological account of the happenings of the serum run. 3 “Radio Station Men Rise To Emergency,” Nome Daily Nugget, February 7, 1925. 4 Quoted in Salisbury, 244. 5 See John W. Ward, “The Meaning of Lindbergh’s Flight,” American Quarterly Vol. 10. No. 1 (Spring, 1958): 3–16. Ward writes: “Lindbergh gave the American people a glimpse of what they liked to think themselves to be at a time when they feared they had deserted their own vision of themselves . . . Lindbergh’s flight was the occasion

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popular image of the loose, forward-thinking 1920s of the Jazz Age, was essentially conservative.6 Their actions all promised that a society that could become so advanced as to invent a cure for diphtheria, a way to communicate across the ether, or a machine that could fly, could also maintain the ability to produce men (or dogs!) whose unselfish, unrefined masculinity remained cast in the mold of old-fashioned heroes. Regressively classic though their virtues may have been, the dogs were feted in a decidedly contemporary style. Gunnar Kasson brought lead dog Balto and his teammates down to Los Angeles, where they received a key to the city from Mary Pickford (the key was in the shape of a dog bone), and where they were quickly put into a short movie, “Balto’s Dash to Nome,” which was filmed near Mt. Rainier.7 In New York, the city whose health department had been the first to use the new science of bacteriology in the control of diphtheria, a collection was taken up in order to get Balto a statue in Central Park—a bronze that is still there to this day. Anchorage also erected a statue in Balto’s honor, as did Nome.8 And in a speech in front of the United States Senate, immediately after the serum run, Senator Clarence Dill, of Washington State (standing in for Alaska, which, as a territory, did not have representation in the Senate), proclaimed: “The classic victory of these dogs and men will probably be the last of its kind, and is certainly a fitting finish to the long history of brilliant achievement made by dog teams in the far North.”9 Unfortunately for Balto and his teammates, while images and ideas of their heroism lived on, their actual quality of life declined. Their remaining years in the contiguous United States were characterized by waxing and waning public interest in their physical presence. Within a year after the serum run, Kasson returned to the North, and Balto and his team were sold to a vaudeville producer and spent some time languishing in sideshows in Los Angeles. In 1927, a businessman from Cleveland named George Kimble recognized Balto in a dime museum

of a public act of regeneration in which the nation momentarily rededicated itself to something, the loss of which was keenly felt” (7). 6 Roderick Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917–1930 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970), 4. 7 “Dog Saviors of Nome Enjoying Thrill of Lives,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1925. 8 Hammonds, 7; “Dogs and Men at Nome,” New York Times, February 5, 1925; “His Effigy Unveiled, Balto is Unmoved,” New York Times, December 16, 1925. 9 “Lauds Rescue Dogs in Senate Speech,” New York Times, February 7, 1925.

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and decided to make an effort to buy him out of captivity. In a campaign organized by the Plain Dealer, the city raised $2,000 to purchase the team, and they were installed at the Brookside Zoo.10 15,000 people visited them on their first day in residence. There they gave rides to children and did other promotional work. Although Balto and his team were celebrated for their love of work and strain particular to Alaska’s frontier conditions, and could not, in any case, have relished being stuck in a cage at a zoo, no contemporary commentators saw a logical disjuncture in this virtual life sentence. When Balto died, he was stuffed and collected at the city’s Museum of Natural History. You can still see him there, and you can also, if you like, buy a small copy of him in stuffed animal form.11 Balto was only the most famous of a string of sled dogs celebrated for their exploits in the frozen North in the era between the Gold Rush and the 1930s. In many cases, such as Balto’s, these dogs were given celebrity on what was seemingly their own terms. Balto was known by his name, and his musher credited him with the enormous success of the completed serum run. In this, he was similar to other dogs, fictional or non-, who became household names—Rowdy, Togo, Buck, Chinook. All were known as paragons of strength and virtue. Accounts of their exploits would seem to invest these particular animals with a large amount of agency. According to the surface values of these narratives, extreme frontier situations created stronger bonds between men and certain animals. Here, men recognized and upheld their dogs’ particular qualities, befriended them, and sometimes even allowed them to transgress their orders, trusting that these dogs would know what was best for the team and for the humans driving it. This degree of observable personality and moral fiber (as the language of the age would have it) was part of the fascination that the public had with Balto and his predecessors. However, the relationship between men and dogs was also a site for men to recast ideas that they had about the nature of whiteness and masculinity. Looked at this way, dogs’ actions could be seen as reflections of their owners’ prowess; as parables for the lives of white men

10

“Husky Dogs to Live in Cleveland,” Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1927. “Permanent Exhibits,” Cleveland Museum of Natural History, <www.cmnh.org> (accessed March 19, 2007). 11

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on the frontier; and as useful analogs for the actions of men fluctuating between the life of the city and the lost vision of the frontier. To understand how canine agency worked in dog stories written about the North, I will first describe the formation of contemporary ideas of Alaska as a haven for the white race—and in particular, a site of rejuvenation for the white male. In her work on the cultural meanings of Alaska, Susan Kollin writes that Alaska’s place in what she calls the nation’s “spatial imagination” has meant that the state has served as an “important locale for Euro-American men who seek the wild, that element of the national past which modernity promises to forever banish.”12 At the beginning of the twentieth century, these ideas about the reclamation of human contact with “wilderness” were fundamental to the ways in which canine bodies were constructed in the popular imagination. Memoirs, fiction, periodical literature and other sources idealized the labor relationship between the new white Alaskan and his sled dogs—a relationship in which canine or worker agency was lauded, within certain boundaries. I posit that these images, rather than merely describing the capacities of certain dogs, offered a utopic re-vision of the possibilities of a collaborative relationship between labor and management, supervisor and supervised, in the new landscape of Alaska. Finally, I will explore the popular myth of the wolf-dog, describing how white Alaskan males used stories of the bodies of their dogs to explore ideas of domestication, “wildness,” and control. All of these human anxieties about race, gender, and work must also be understood through another layer of context: that of fascinations with the category of “animal” at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Mark Feldman, following in the tradition of Erica Fudge’s call for “holistic histories” of animals, writes that representations of animals at this time showed a “significance and urgency” that was particular to a post-Darwinian mindset attempting to understand the relationship between the human and the animal: “During this period, representations of animals were used to rethink the human—in particular, the structure and nature of human interiority.”13 I would add that a place-based understanding of the man–dog relationship in Alaska provides an unusual platform for a rethinking 12

Susan Kollin, Nature’s State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 92. 13 Mark Feldman, “The Physics and Metaphysics of Caging: The Animal in Late Nineteenth-Century American Culture,” Mosaic, December 2006, v. 36, i4: 161 (20);

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of the possibilities of human-animal relationships. In thinking about Alaskan wilderness, and Alaskan dogs, white men tested out theories of both the desirable and undesirable animality of different categories of humans, and the desirable humanity of some particular animals. The Great White State: Alaska as Anglo-Nordic Refuge Alaska’s romantic position in the imagination of white writers of the late nineteenth and early 20th century must be placed firmly in the realm of racial ideology, and an understanding of Alaska’s racial significance must be employed in describing dog stories written by white men (as were all of the sources I examine). White opinion of the time held that Alaska was a refuge for Anglo-Americans during a time of racial threat. Eric T. L. Love argues that many potential United States imperial acquisitions during this era were stymied by racist sentiment opposed to the incorporation of non-white nations into the body politic. Alaska formed a significant exception to this rule. Some expansionists, Love writes, who were frightened of acquiring tropical locales full of unruly black or brown populations, “looked to the north, guided by tradition, history, an unquestioned faith in manifest destiny, and commonplace assumptions regarding race and natural law.”14 The public idea of Alaska, after its acquisition in 1867, saw the territory as a toehold of an expanding American empire. Although the most common understanding of the acquisition’s public reception points to the fact that pre-Gold Rush pundits nicknamed the newest American land “Seward’s Folly” or “Seward’s Icebox”—ridiculing Secretary of State William Seward for having advocated the purchase of a supposedly icy and inhospitable tract—historian Richard E. Welch, Jr has delineated a second and more powerful imperial undercurrent in public opinion about the Alaskan acquisition. Welch writes that a tipping point in public perceptions came when intimations of the possibility of the annexation of Canada as an extension of the Alaska purchase become public. Welch analyzes newspaper responses to the purchase of Alaska in 1867, pointing to evidence that newspaper editorials of the time not

Erica Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 5. 14 Eric T. L. Love, Race Over Empire: Racism and US Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 31.

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only approved of the idea, but also touted Alaska as the first step on the road to colonization of all of Canada.15 This imperial ambition may seem awkward or strange for present-day observers to acknowledge, but was quite accepted in the nineteenth (and early twentieth) century. One of the main factors in white affection for Alaska was the idea that the climate of the territory would activate the most sterling qualities of the white (Nordic) race—and, implicitly, keep others of less desirable colors at bay. Love points to the influence of scientist Louis Agassiz, whose Essay on Classification (1851) described the ways in which each race was suited to its climate zone. Love writes that Agassiz corresponded with Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in 1867, to urge him to support the purchase of Alaska. Anglo-Saxons were destined, said Agassiz, to prosper in the northern temperate zones. Stephen Jay Gould, in his work on scientific racism, summarizes Agassiz’ thought on the place of the North in the birthright of Nordic white people: Fortunately, nature shall be the accomplice of moral virtue; for people, free to choose, gravitate naturally toward the climates of their original homeland. The black species, created for hot and humid conditions, will prevail in the Southern lowlands, though whites will maintain dominion over the seashore and elevated ground. The new South will contain some Negro states . . . but the bracing North is not a congenial home for carefree and lackadaisical people, created for warmer regions.16

Agassiz’ North would act as a natural barrier between white people and brown people, equalizing pressure between the races and creating natural segregation, while enhancing the positive qualities of the “white” race: rationality, a strong work ethic, and intelligence. Stories about men and dogs in Alaska, as we shall see, focused on this notion of the unlocking of racial possibility through contact with the landscape of the North. Many popular conceptions of Alaska as a space during this time period echoed this intellectual fixation on the whiteness and Nordicness of the men who moved up North, and on their natural fitness for the land itself. The idea of the Nordic or Anglo immigrant’s “natural” place within the landscape of the North erased the Native Alaskan’s claim on the land, creating, as it did, an image of an empty place, 15

Richard Welch, “Buying Alaska: The Myth of Icebergia,” in Interpreting Alaska’s History: An Anthology, ed. Mary Childers Mangusso and Stephen W. Haycox (Anchorage: Alaska Pacific University Press, 1989). 16 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 82.

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ready to receive the returning superior races which were worthy of its greatness. Alaskan stories of racial regeneration reiterated American patterns of frontier literary description described by Bruce Greenfield, who examines the ways in which those prototypical American explorerauthors Lewis and Clark created authority in their writings. Greenfield observes that Lewis and Clark “invoke their own aesthetic responses as an authority for their presence in what they know are inhabited lands.”17 In this way, appreciation for the Alaskan scenery, an appreciation which white authors saw as specific to themselves, became the natural proof of land ownership. Beyond using their own ability to appreciate Alaska’s scenery to establish their natural right to inhabit the landscape, white authors praising Alaska also pointed to their bodily responses to the climate as a way to establish authority. During a time when anxieties over the body’s responses to industrialization ran high, Alaska’s positive effects on the white body seemed to establish the naturalness of the white presence in the North. A visiting correspondent from Harper’s, writing in 1909 after the heat of the gold rushes, observed that many new Alaskans tended to be Swedish or Norwegian, writing approvingly that the “material environment,” or climactic conditions, in which these races had been forged was favorable, and thus “a high type of man was produced. Because of [these material conditions] these races stand at the forefront of the nations in stature and in the vital quality of endurance. They display to us the superlative animal man, so far as he is known to this period of our humanity’s progression.” The reporter continued, observing that these Nordics, reinserted in the Nordic environment, reached beyond their former achievements, inspired by this new land: “I do not remember to have met a single man living the outdoor life of Alaska who showed any lack of energy or, indeed, the slightest inclination toward laziness. The very air itself most assuredly is a mighty spur to endeavor. It is not in the least unreasonable to believe that the future Alaskan will be the most industrious man of the Caucasian race.”18

17 Bruce Greenfield, “The Problem of the Discoverer’s Authority in Lewis and Clark’s History,” in Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, ed. Jonathon Arac and Harriet Ritvo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 17. 18 Roy Norton, “The New Man of the North,” Harper’s, 8/21/09, 0016ad–0020a. For other examples of contemporary characterization of Alaska as a “land of the Vikings”, see also a review of musher Leonhard Seppala’s autobiography, “Brief Reviews,” New York Times, Oct 12, 1930, BR11; the autobiography of Brig. Gen. William L. Mitchell,

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All of this rhetoric around a supposed link to the Vikings and other Nordic “races” served, of course, not only to establish a white claim on the land, but also to exclude those who were not racially descended from this stock. This human baggage of racial anxiety, which the qualities of the Alaskan landscape promised to mitigate and assuage, forms the background for the way in which sled dogs were used and understood in popular culture of the time. If positive qualities of “white” were to be reinscribed and reinforced through the salubrious atmosphere of the North, stories about the actions of sled dogs were an integral part of the story of this reinscription. Through their positive and constructive interactions with the white explorers, as well as their own bodily responses to the Alaskan landscape, they reaffirmed the “right” of the white man to colonize this new frontier and mirrored the racial regeneration that white men perceived as taking place on Alaskan ground. The New Workplace of the North: Whites, Sled Dogs, Domestication, and Partnership Imagination of a successful white colonization of Alaska depended on the conception of utopic workplaces. These were sites in which white men could, using their newfound racial inheritance of endurance and strength, bequeathed to them by the salubrious climate, labor in order to transform a perceived pre-modern landscape into one which would render forth its riches and advantages. Stories about human relationships with working canines formed ideas of the type of labor that would flourish in the imaginative space of Alaska. Canine agency, whether freely allowed or directed by relationships with their owners/supervisors, was integral to these stories. Male writers characterized their relationships with dogs in Alaska as perfect working partnerships. As in so many other aspects, Alaska provided the site for a more perfect union—in this case, a union of the owner and the worker; the supervisor and the supervised; the order-giver The Opening of Alaska, ed. Lyman L. Woodman (Anchorage, AK: Cook Inlet Historical Society, 1982), 4; editorial comment, Alaska-Yukon Magazine, March 1908 5:1, 63–64. The Alaska-Yukon Magazine began its life as “Alaska’s Magazine,” and changed its name around the time that the Seattle Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (1909) began its planning stages. When citing pieces from the publication, I will the name in use at the time of the article’s printing.

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and the obedient (and perhaps, in an implied fashion, the master and the slave). When describing their relationships with their “lead dogs,” in particular, men characterized the interactions as something on the order of a love affair. In this sense, their idealized Alaskan man-dog partnership both reflects and rejects ideas of standardization and control in the working relationship prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century. Essential to this rejection is the glorification of animal agency. Men interacting with dogs in Alaska wanted to think of their working partnerships as based on interactions between two fully invested subjects—within certain bounds. In some ways, these relationships could be seen as simple exercises of white masculine power. Donna Haraway writes in her Companion Species Manifesto about a certain class of humanity who might view the owning and training of “companion species”—animals, such as dogs, which have evolved alongside and been accustomed to work with humanity—as an exercise of will, or an assertion of dominance. A genre of people who Haraway calls “humanist technophiliacs” might see domestication as an act of domination, or an exertion of self-power (or, as Haraway puts it, “the paradigmatic act of masculine, single-parent, self-birthing, whereby man makes himself repetitively as he invents (creates) his tools.”)19 However, the man-animal relationships on display in the books and memoirs of Alaskan settlers seem to complicate this framework. In most of these stories, the working relationship is conceptually rehumanized, in a way that stands as a tacit rebuke to the “civilized” or contentiously mechanized new working world back “down South.”20 Here, these powerful partnership stories argue, great things are still accomplished on a small scale, with actors working together, instead of in conflict. Coverage of the serum run illustrates this utopian ideal. In this situation, the dogs were seen as absolutely the opposite of the machines (airplanes) that made the bid to replace them. Dogs, in their very non-machineness, recreated an imaginary past working world infused with emotional meaning. The partnership between a musher and his lead dog was the object of most of the commentary on the wonders of sled dogs in the working 19

Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 27. 20 Alaskans since the early 20th century have used the word “Outside” to denominate non-Alaskan space.

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sphere. Emotions that mushers felt for their dogs ran the gamut from respect to a sense of true partnership and love. In many of these cases, the man-dog relationship reads like a fatherson, or a husband-wife dichotomy. Men remember dogs as trusted companions in fondly recounted endeavors—adventures that actual wives or sons would be too fragile to face. Susan Johnson, in her study of the camps of the California Gold Rush, points out that the lack of (white) women in these spaces led to a wide array of domestic arrangements, many highly unconventional, and a concurrent disruption of gender roles. Johnson writes that this disruption meant that “even in so short a time as the Gold Rush years and even in so small a place as the Southern Mines, meanings proliferated, evolved, collided.”21 Alaskan gold miners experienced many of the same disruptions, with the rush of men to the north resulting in a wholly homosocial environment. In this male world, dogs—while nominally used as workers—were also the emotional allies of white explorers. (The Nome Daily Nugget headlined news of the arrival of the diphtheria serum “The Dog of the North, The White Man’s Best Friend North of ’55, Comes to the Rescue of Nome with Diphtheria Antitoxin.”)22 These man-male dog friendships are notable for their supposedly superior qualities of honesty, loyalty, and trust. A fictional sourdough (or seasoned Alaskan resident) named Jim, created for an Alaska’s Magazine story of 1905, tells another man of his feelings for his dog, Summit, who has been kidnapped by evil Indians. The sourdough anchors his description of their bond by pointing to the dog’s ability to feel human emotion, and cites a specific instance in which that emotional tie saved Jim from backcountry disaster: Summit was the best living friend I had and he possessed as much feeling—downright heart feeling—as you or I, Buck. Why, when I was sitting by the fire last night, drinking loneliness, I thought of the time when he saved my life on the Tonsina, and when I lost all the grub off my back in the Kotsina River, and stood helpless on the bank as our supplies drifted down around the bend, and I thought of Summit as he ran over that high point and chased down along the bank, then swam into the swift-running

21 Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2000), 100. 22 Nome Daily Nugget, February 14, 1925, 1.

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These bonds, deriving from the mutual effort of the two species in a forbidding land, are seen as superior to many human-human relationships. The understanding between a man and his dog, importantly, extended beyond that of a man and a domesticated beast back in the imaginative space of “civilization.” This partnership was superior to the mere keeping of a dog for decorative or entertainment purposes, because it was forged around work. Hudson Stuck, a missionary and the Episcopal Archdeacon of the Yukon, who was the first white man to ascend Denali in 1913 and who traveled extensively through the territory on a dogsled, wrote of the mix of respect and love necessary between a man and a dog before the two could form a partnership. Eulogizing a dog named Nanook, who was killed when kicked by a horse, Stuck remembers their relationship: “Nanook was a most independent dog and took to himself an air of partnership rather than subjection. Any man can make friends with any dog if he will, there is no question about that, but it takes a long time and mutual trust and mutual forbearance and mutual appreciation to make a partnership. Not every dog is fit to be partner with a man; nor every man, I think, fit to be partner with a dog.”24 In this assessment, the bond between man and “independent” dog certifies the man—Stuck—as possessing a legitimate masculinity. Perhaps the most famous Alaskan man-dog pair, Buck and John Thornton, of Jack London’s Call of the Wild, exemplifies this process of validation. Buck seems able to discern that Thornton is, at last, the master he has been looking for—one who is man enough to be worth submitting to. This love-at-first-sight is described in terms suitable to any number of sentimental novels: Buck would lie by the hour, eager, alert, at Thornton’s feet, looking up into his face, dwelling upon it, studying it, following with keenest interest each fleeting expression, every movement and change of feature. Or, as chance might have it, he would lie farther away, to the side and rear, watching the outlines of the man and the occasional movements of his body. And often, such was the communion in which they lived, the

23

Addison Powell, “The Alaska Partners,” AM May 05 1:2, 114. Hudson Stuck, Thousand Miles With A Dog Sled: A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1988 [repub., original printing, Scribner’s, 1914]), 238. 24

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strength of Buck’s gaze would draw John Thornton’s head around, and he would return the gaze, without speech, his heart shining out of his eyes as Buck’s heart shone out.25

E. Anthony Rotundo describes what he calls “noble submission,” a concept of manhood in currency at the end of the nineteenth century, which held that masculinity could allow for self-sacrifice in the context of having found a fellow man—a leader, either military or corporate—who would be worthy of such a sacrifice. This new ideal of self-sacrifice in masculine relationships could explain the emphasis on these dogs’ fierce loyalty and devotion.26 But both Buck and Nanook, as imagined by these authors, seem to be able to be submissive while maintaining their status as equal partners. Through their characters, they avoided the unattractive prospect of being, as Stuck puts it, a subject to the will of the man/owner. Their continued independence—signaled by Nanook’s insistence on stealing and eating food when left within his reach, and making some trail decisions for himself; and by Buck’s eventual vanishing back into the wild—is what made these dogs worthy friends and partners. These details also allowed them to retain their masculine qualities, implicitly adding to the masculinity of those men who own them. The independent agency of these dogs implied that the working relationship of man and dog in Alaska was one imbued with dignity, love, and equality. Most of the dogs these men dwelt upon in their narratives functioned in the position of lead dogs. The place of the lead dog was to serve as the liaison between the will of the man and the understanding of the rest of the dogs in the dog team. Men who wrote about lead dogs invested them with desirable leadership qualities such as confidence, authority, and a mystical ability to command respect from their fellow dogs. By articulating their respect for these qualities, these men implicitly branded their lead dogs as embodying desirable human leadership traits prized by the male culture of the time; and—by extension—themselves as possessing similar qualities, for they were, of course, the ones who were ultimately in charge. Leaders acted as translators for their masters, enforcing the will of the supervisor even when the team wanted to disobey. Arthur Bartlett’s 25

Jack London, The Call of the Wild (Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor Media Group, 2006—original story published in 1903), 55. 26 E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 237–38.

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1926 juvenile fiction starring a lead dog named Spunk took a village in New England as its setting, but the relationship between Spunk and his young master takes on many of the same qualities as the Alaskan ideal described in other books, showing the way in which the Alaskan mystique could be translated into northern settings in other parts of the United States. Spunk saves the team and the driver from disaster when they are on a winter jaunt up New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, forestalling a rebellion when the team falters on a knife-edge ridge. “Spunk stood immovable in his tracks, resisting with every ounce of energy in his great body the slight downward pull that had already started. Then, as some tenseness seemed to come over the whole team, as though the moment for the dash was at hand, he emitted a sharp growl. That was all, but it arrested that fatal mutiny just as it was about to start.”27 The famed musher Leonhard Seppala wrote that his lead dog Togo, who was a lesser-known hero of the serum run, was similarly able to make the team perform when Seppala’s communication with them failed. Bringing a string of dogs past a second string on a trail could be treacherous, Seppala explained, because the dogs were inclined to tangle with the foreign animals and create a snarl that could delay the team. When his team was in this position, “as long as Togo could see [the foreign string] behind him, he would jump into his collar, yelp, and run ahead, and his team mates seemed to understand him.”28 For this ability, among others, Seppala thought Togo was the best natural lead dog the North had ever seen.29 Lead dogs such as Togo emerge out of a process of natural selection, making the sled dog team into a meritocracy of talents. Arthur Walden was a Bostonian who worked as a “dog-puncher” (one who hauled freight by dog sled) during the Gold Rush, and later started an influential kennel in New Hampshire. Walden described his most significant dog relationship, with a hound named Chinook, who ended up as the stud for his entire line of sled dogs. Chinook, when a puppy, was originally put in the position of wheel dog, but immediately demanded 27 Arthur C. Bartlett, Spunk: Leader of the Dog Team (New York: W. A. Wilde and Co., 1926), 212–13. 28 Elizabeth M. Ricker, Seppala: Alaskan Dog Driver (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1930), 284–85. 29 Seppala resented Togo’s being passed over for fame in favor of Balto, who Seppala viewed as an incidental hero (a “newspaper dog”), certainly undeserving of a statue in Central Park. Ricker, 280–81.

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to be made lead. Eva Brunell Seeley and Martha A. L. Lane wrote a biography of Chinook and his sons and daughters, which explicitly sought to impart moral lessons to a juvenile audience (a function for which the animal appeal and working condition of the sled dog seems particularly suited, both in the early years of the century and today).30 Seeley and Lane explain to their child-readers that Chinook displayed desirable qualities of initiative in his coup, which unseated his brother as lead: “Taking the harness in his teeth he jumped up and down, saying as plainly as words could have done: ‘Oh, please let me try! Let me show what I can do!’” From that day on, he’s the leader and the rest of the dogs love to follow him.”31 Scotty Allan, another famed musher of Nome, owned a favorite lead dog, Baldy, who was initially seen as a freight or working dog, more valuable for muscle than for intelligence. Baldy eventually proves himself when put in the position of lead when the team is in dire straits during a storm and one of the other leaders is injured.32 By figuring these dogs as superior to their teammates, authors emphasized their agency in taking control of their circumstances, but also told themselves the story of a perfect human meritocracy, one in which qualities of leadership would naturally be recognized. The desire to achieve happiness through work distinguishes these Alaskan dogs, both when in the lead and when working in other team positions, from their implied opposites: pampered and non-active dogs, produced by civilization and overbreeding. Bartlett writes of Spunk’s teammates that they were a motley crew, not conforming to particular aesthetic standards, but that in this situation, aesthetics were less important than the internal impetus to work: “These are not the aristocrats of dogdom—the bluebloods. These are the redbloods. Theirs is an aristocracy of life and action.”33 Through this rhetoric of the advantages of activity over inert, civilized living, these stories reconstitute a workplace in which the sheer desire to work and willingness to exert could gain a dog—or a man—the success and happiness he wanted.

30 The story of Balto, for example, was the subject of a children’s animated movie, which came out in 1995. In this film, Kevin Bacon voices the character of Balto, a scrappy outcast half-wolf who makes good through his natural qualities of perseverance and endurance. Two sequels went straight to video in 2002 and 2004. 31 Eva Brunnell Seeley and Martha A. L. Lane, Chinook and his Family: True Dog Stories (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1930), 14–16. 32 Darling, 171. 33 Bartlett, 169.

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Authors who described man-dog relationships in the North emphasized the honesty, love, and dignity inherent in the partnership. Through their descriptions of animals, they reclaimed workplaces with workers who delighted in laboring for their masters, and masters who were able to carry on their work without interference from outside forces or friction with labor. And in doing so, they created a particular type of circumscribed and lauded canine agency, one that reflected well upon owners and strengthened the bonds between man and dog. The Lupine in the Canine: Dog-Wolves and the Romance of Recapitulation Another way in which sled dog stories articulated issues of human and animal agency was played out via a characteristically early 20th century fascination with blood, lineage, ancestry, and evolution. Almost without exception, the Alaskan sled dog story referred to the dog’s wolfish ancestry, emphasizing the domesticated/wild opposition. Whether the wolf in the dog is conceptualized as deriving from a distant ancestor, as was the case with Jack London’s famous Buck, or whether the dog himself is seen as half, or even three-quarters, wolf, writings about Alaska’s canine inhabitants attributed the dogs’ toughness and aggressiveness to their lupine heritage. The frequency of this construction and its widespread nature speaks to its popularity among the reading public. Newspaper accounts of the serum run, for example, often called Kasson’s team “Siberian wolves.” Several different newspapers published Kasson’s debriefing after the run, which was initially reported by the New York World. The Los Angeles Times chose to pull “Dogs Half Wolves” as the first subhed in their article. The Chicago Daily Tribune, dealing with the same material, pulled “Kasson’s Dogs Half Wolf.”34 Slim Williams, an Alaska booster and neonative who drove a dog team from Alaska to Washington, DC in 1932, in a stunt intended to raise support for a highway along the same route, went on the Chautauqua lecture circuit afterwards and was advertised with a flier reading “Slim Williams: The Alaskan Adventurer and Musher Who Became World Famous For Driving His Wolf-Dog

34 Gunnar Kasson, “Hardy Musher Describes Race in Howling Storm”; Los Angeles Times, February 4, 1925; Gunnar Kasson, “Gunnar Kasson Tells Story of Race to Nome,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 4, 1925.

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Team 5,600 Miles Blazing the Proposed Alaska-US Highway.”35 A stereographic image of men with a dog team, published at the turn of the century, dwells heavily on the dogs’ savagery: The leader looks very much like a wolf. He belongs to a tribe called Malemute. That is, he is a tamed wolf of a northern kind. These wolves are captured by the Eskimos when they are little puppies and are trained. But even when tamed it would not be safe for a stranger to come too close to them. If you were to lay your hand on this dog’s head, the chances are his fangs would be snapping at you a moment afterwards. Most of the Malemutes used are raised from the tamed wolves.

The fact that the white sourdough leading the dog team has his hand on the lead dog’s head lends the scene a sense of romantic danger and dominant masculinity.36 These qualities of the Alaskan sled dog story were at least partially created by public demand. As Roderick Nash says of Jack London’s two books about dogs who flirt with the dogwolf boundary, Call of the Wild and White Fang, Call, in which a dog goes from civilized to wild, was far more popular than Fang, in which a wolf takes the opposite path.37 The origin story of the dog-wolf could take any number of forms. Seeley and Lane wrote that the Indians would create this hybrid by their breeding methods. This story, while intended to appeal to their child audience, also, like the origin story of the stereographic slide, colorfully proposed an Indian world with permeable wild-human boundaries: “Once in a while an Indian driver would find a motherless baby wolf half dead in the snow and would carry it home for his children to feed and play with. It was often possible to tame the little stranger and to teach him how to help pull the sled with the dogs of the household. In time a new breed of worker, half wolf and half dog, might be found in many of the teams.”38 Some stories pictured white men taming or incorporating wolves into their dog teams, such as the story which ran in Alaska Magazine in 1906 and dealt with the life of Eli Smith, a mail carrier. Of Smith’s leader, Wolfe, the writer notes “The useful 35 See flier, page T. K. Williams’ lecture was advertised as “Rugged—Picturesque— Humorous—Philosophical”, a perfect encapsulation of the sourdough mystique. 36 See image, page TK. “A Dog Team in the Land of Ice, Arctic City, Alaska.” Keystone View Company, 1896–1913. Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, Stereographic Library Collection, University of Alaska, Fairbanks. 37 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 156. 38 Seeley and Lane, 18.

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Illustration 1. Advertisement for lecture by Slim Williams. Created 19–? Repository: University of Iowa Libraries, Special Collections Division.

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Illustration 2. “A Dog Team in the Land of Ice, Arctic City, Alaska.” Keystone View Company, 1896–1913. Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, Stereographic Library Collection, University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

career of this noble beast is all the more interesting because he is a full-blooded wolf, captured in the wilds of the Far North and trained to lead a plebian dog team. Thus, in captivity, he is a leader of dogs, even as he was a king among wolves of the wild.”39 In these stories, the domesticating powers of white men were tested against the ultimate denizens of the wild. Others proposed that a miscegenation based on lust was the origin of the dog-wolf hybrid. Robert Joseph Diven gives his fictional dog Rowdy this type of lineage, writing that Rowdy was the product of a liaison between his dog mother, a “Russian wolfhound of magnificent proportions,” and his wolf father, “a full-blood wolf, of great size and beauty,”40 who meet when the father’s wolf pack swings by the camp where the mother’s owner has her tethered outside. The titillation of this type of animal story proved irresistible to writers who would turn their noses up at “squaw-men” (Anglos who married or lived with Indian or Alaska Native women).

39 Luther Griffith, “Eli Smith, Arctic Mail Carrier, USA,” Alaska Magazine, April 1906, 45. 40 Robert Joseph Diven, Rowdy (New York: The Century Co., 1927), 10.

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It is impossible to discern from afar whether the men who wrote of taming or breeding wolves were telling the truth. Later scientific analysis has shown that cross-breeding between husky dogs and wolves was unlikely for a number of biological reasons.41 But the popularity of this story, be it true or false, speaks to a fascination with, and romanticization of, the wolf—a fixation that seems significant, given Americans’ historical determination to extirpate the lupine element. Historian Jon T. Coleman writes that the American attitude toward the wolf has journeyed from “unanimity to ambiguity,” and the place of the sled dog in this journey marks an interesting moment in this growing ambiguity.42 Coleman writes that early settlers in New England and nineteenthcentury westward-moving pioneers viewed the wolf as a threatening and undesirable species, and that they acted accordingly, killing wolves with brutal abandon and cruelty. Some writers, cleaving to this earlier attitude, treated the Alaskan sled dog’s wolfish tendencies as undesirable or frightening. One particular supposed quality of wolves—their apparently conscious ability to lay plans which counteract or destroy the plans or desires of the human—forms the basis of most negative stories about wolf-dogs, and provides an interesting point of comparison when considering questions of desirable or undesirable types of canine or lupine agency. A story in Alaska Life, published in 1939, wrote of a wolf with “enough husky in him to make him man-smart.” This particular wolf-husky infiltrates dog teams, stealing food at night and killing defenseless domesticated dogs when the owner is not watching. This fantasy, which makes a point of the slyness and guile of the wolf, echoes attitudes, fueled by years of folklore, of earlier settlers toward the species, which they saw as plotting against them in a human way. At the end of the story, the narrator, having finally ferreted out the infiltrator, kills him and makes a rug out of his hide: “I look it over every now and then and heave a sigh and promise myself not to raise any more huskies with wolf in them.”43 For Lester, as well as other writers of the time, being part-wolf is no badge of honor.

41 Ian Kenneth MacRury, The Inuit Dog: Its Provenance, Environment, and History (Inuit Sled Dog International, Harwinton, CT, 1991), 8, 40. 42 Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 4. 43 Joseph Lester, “Never Give Your Promise to a Dead Man: A Legendary Tale of the Arctic,” Alaska Life, July 1939, 22.

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These older, fearful attitudes were beginning to give way, at the very time that Alaska was being settled by Anglos, to a new admiration for the wolf. Coleman writes that during the beginning of the 20th century, the federal government began to bureaucratize the killing of wolves, extirpating the species from most of the continental United States by the end of the 1940s. However, this mass scientific project of the killing of wolves also resulted in a growing respect for the animals, “introducing the doomed yet heroic ‘last wolves’ into the lexicon of wolf legends.”44 These “last wolves” manifested many qualities that these men, who sought to kill them, paradoxically admired, in much the same mode as James Fenimore Cooper’s primitivist respect for the noble-savage Native Americans of his Last of the Mohicans (1826). In Alaska, a factor that played into Anglo admiration of dogs’ wolfish qualities was a now-outmoded offshoot of early Darwinism that enjoyed great popularity in its day: the theory of recapitulation. German biologist Ernst Haeckel conceived of what came to be called “recapitulation theory” in 1866. The basic form of the theory held that each individual, through its development, would go through the entire course of evolution taken by the species. This idea’s intellectual resonance was felt in the discourses of education—as exemplified by early psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s view of child development as analogous to the development of the (Western, Anglo) human species. In Hall’s view, the child is the savage; the adolescent, society in its nascent states of reasoning; the adult, the fully formed, up-to-date Western society. Adolescence, by this theory, is a stormy time in part because this is the era in which each individual human is infused with the knowledge of an advanced race.45 Later, the idea moved into the realm of racial theory, as many scientific racists took the view that “advanced” societies represented the entire range of human experience, while more “primitive” societies were stuck at an early stage. This particular form of scientific racism consigned “primitive” people to a permanent state of childhood—as could be seen, for example, in the constant characterization of the Inuit as “happy children.”

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Coleman, 12. Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 90. 45

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Recapitulation theory also played a part in what many have described as the fin-de-siecle crisis of urbanized manliness.46 Gail Bederman, in her discussion of Hall’s involvement with recapitulation theory, writes that Hall believed the answer to this conundrum—civilization = unmanliness, yet savagery = regression—would lie in a controlled dose of primitive impulses such as rage, anger, and sexual passion, administered during a childhood that would allow a (male) child to feel these passions and derive virility from them, without infecting his whole life with their less desirable qualities.47 Importantly, this theory emphasized the ability of the human to shift back and forth in and out of this animality. In his writing on manhood in the early 20th century, John Kasson points out that what drew fans to the fictional ape-man Tarzan, the magician Harry Houdini, and muscleman Eugene Sandow was the “transformation from weakness to supreme strength, from vulnerability to triumph, from anonymity to heroism, from the confinement of modern life to the recovery of freedom.”48 Favorable descriptions of dogs with wolfish tendencies both embody a popularization of recapitulation theory’s emphasis on the strength of savagery, and amplify what Kasson points out as an obsession with the ability to morph back and forth between the poles of subjection and strength. Through fantasies of wolf-dogs whose strength came from their wild blood, but who nonetheless remained obedient to, and controlled by their masters, Americans deeply questioned what it meant to be “domesticated” and what place the “racial inheritance” of aggression, endurance, and physical strength might have in the life of a man living in modern society. The end of recapitulation theory’s scientific heyday came before most of the texts that I am examining in this study were published. By the first years of the century, the theory had been discredited in the biological realm, and Hall was forced to alter the tone of his rhetoric; however, Bederman points to a newspaper article from 1915 in which manly passions of anger and aggression are clearly credited with salubrious effects, arguing that this shows evidence that the theory may have had

46 See, for example, George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 78. 47 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 95. 48 John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 8.

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continuing “legs” within the culture, if not the scientific establishment.49 Certainly, naturalist writers such as London and Frank Norris engaged with these themes. Mark Feldman writes, for example, these writers were engaged in an “effort to represent the post-Darwinian subject,” an effort shared by philosophers and scientists including Nietzsche and Freud, who “came to rethink the relationship between the animal and human, and to imagine human evolution and history as processes of internalizing and caging the animal within the human.”50 Alaska seemed to act as a convenient testing ground for recapitulation theory, stripping away, as it did, other accoutrements of late civilization. Humans in these Northland stories sometimes temporarily burst the bonds of civility/evolution/history when faced with the primal landscape. A sourdough named Kent, star of an adventure novel written at the late date of 1942, when confronted with being marooned in the bush without food, accesses these impulses in his struggle to survive: “Meeting nature barehanded with the tools of man’s intelligence taken away from him, Kent acted much as the wolf or fox would act. He set his mind on a course he must follow and clung to it. He kept going and he kept his senses alert.”51 Here, the brush with death acts as a strong drug, liberating the civilized human from the requirements of society, transforming him into a sort of a beast. The savage traits of sled dogs also tend to come out in moments of stress, as when Diven’s Rowdy, having been goaded into a fight by a rival dog named Devil’s Dream, becomes wolfish in his brawling style. The narrator writes: As I watched Rowdy leap about, trying now one and now another of the wolf’s fighting tactics, I could see that my playful friend of a few minutes before had been transformed. Ferocity and cunning now possessed him to such a degree as I had never before witnessed in any creature. Every feature of my affectionate playmate had disappeared. The wild nature in him was now dominant. In his eyes, as in the eyes of the Devil’s Dream, flamed the lust to terrorize, to rend, to kill.52

Dogs who combined aspects of the wolfish and the civilized also often deployed their savagery in service of their masters. Scotty Allan, lost

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Bederman, 116. Feldman, 165. 51 Rutherford Montgomery, Husky: Co-Pilot of the Pilgrim (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1942), 27. 52 Diven, 19. 50

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on the trail, writes that his two lead dogs found the way for him again, using their sense of smell: “It was the wolf in them [Kid and Baldy] that was finding the trail for me, but the pride and courage of their dog blood that was leading their team on against the blinding gale.”53 London describes Buck’s supreme strength and physical superiority as the ideal combination of civilized and wild traits: “[Buck’s] cunning was wolf cunning, and wild cunning; his intelligence, shepherd intelligence and St. Bernard intelligence; and all this, plus an experience gained in the finest of schools, made him as formidable a creature as any that roamed the wild.”54 Buck is a combination of street-smart and educated, and both traits come from his blood. His love for John Thornton leads him to kill the Yeehat Indians who he finds out have murdered his master—and to kill them in a savage fashion, abandoning the constrictions of human rules.55 Wolf dogs—the ones being lionized in these fictions—never turn on the men they love. Their loyalty re-inscribes the vitality of the man-dog relationship and implies that the superhuman Anglo-American man, in his ability to control a dog who is a wolf, is also able to control a piece of the wild Alaskan landscape itself. However much these dog/wolves were controlled, however, they always maintained a wild core that writers idealized as an outlet from society’s bonds. Writers often described a romantic vanishing of some of these wolf-dogs back into the Northern forests. Even when he is at the height of his love affair with John Thornton, London leaves Buck an out, foreshadowing his eventual vanishing: “Faithfulness and devotion, things born of fire and roof, were his; yet he retained his wildness and wiliness. He was a thing of the wild, come in from the wild to sit by John Thornton’s fire, rather than a dog of the soft Southland stamped with the marks of generations of civilization.”56The narrator of a story written by Ralph Johnson, which ran in Alaska Sportsman, describes a dog named Chinook who lives for a while with two partnered sourdoughs. Chinook, after a time with the two, eventually “slinks away into the forest.” The narrator, back in “civilization,” muses on his old friend’s fate: “As the evening shadows fall I often picture Chinook leading the pack up there, in the northern woods. I wonder

53 54 55 56

Allan, 189. London, 1903, 71. London, 1903, 76. London, 1903, 55.

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if we should ever go back there and suddenly run across him on some trail—would he recognize us? Or, would he bare his fangs and dash back in the forest to his mates? Someday, we may return and see.”57 The always-open possibility of retreat to wolfishness was a powerful fantasy of escape, of Kasson’s “recovery of freedom,” possible for dogs who live in the polar areas (but, importantly, giving a sense of freedom to their masters as well). The full significance of this ultimate recovery of agency can be seen in one of the most powerful vanishing-dog stories of the era. Arthur Walden’s Chinook (no relation to Johnson’s fictional dog), who embodied the loyal and obedient qualities of the master lead dog, eventually took this escape valve at the end of his life. Walden, who had returned from his time in Alaska to establish a kennel in New Hampshire with Chinook as its lead stud dog, volunteered his services—and, of course, those of his dogs—for Richard Byrd’s 1929 expedition to Antarctica. Chinook came along, although he was twelve years old and beginning to fail in strength. According to the legend, as retold by Seeley and Lane, Chinook faced a challenge from a rival dog who wanted to take over his alpha-dog status in the kennel, and failed to “best” him. It was Chinook’s birthday. “That night he woke his master by laying a cold nose against his cheek. Three times he did this, each time receiving a comforting pat on the head. Little did Mr. Walden think at the time that the old dog was saying good-by,” wrote Seeley and Lane.58After this “farewell,” Chinook wandered away into the Antarctic wild, never to be seen again. A newspaper account of the happening, from 1930, wrote: “[Chinook] was not to be found when the team was harnessed, and one of the men remembered seeing him trotting off toward the cold horizon. What happened to him no one will ever know, but men wise in the lore of dogs shake their heads and murmur that the old ones do commit suicide when they feel themselves no longer able to carry on.”59 Chinook’s story encapsulates the contradictions of the human idea of canine wildness—and canine agency. On the one hand, Chinook’s suicide is an attractive story to the men and women who tell it because

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Ralph Johnson, “Chinook,” Alaska Sportsman, April 1936, 9. Seeley and Lane, 202–03. 59 Mildred Adams, “Dogs That Rank as Heroes Have a Hall of Fame,” The New York Times, Jan. 5, 1930, SM7. 58

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it implies that even a dog who is by breeding and training practically the alter ego of the man who owns him can still find it inside himself to claim the radical and deadly autonomy of a suicide in the wild Antarctic landscape. The story, interpreted this way, says that even the most civilized and caged human man could possibly access a similar connection with the wild freedom of pure animal instinct. He could assert control over his life by refusing, at the moment of crisis, to conform to the rules of human society. At the same time, Chinook’s suicide comes at a time when he sees himself as no longer able to be of service to his master. This act of freedom, of transformation, could also be seen as the ultimate result of the human conditioning which Chinook has been given. In this last act, Chinook frees his master from the burden of taking care of him as he ages and loses his usefulness—as he slips from the realm of the human partner into the animal needs of his body, needing care and giving back no tangible benefit. Thus, the complicated figure of the dog-wolf seems to defy human control, but also fulfills human desires for freedom, autonomy, and wildness. Conclusions: The Free and the Wild Famed sled dogs of Alaskan lore embodied the white male’s complicated relationship with work, obedience, freedom, and wildness in the time of technological advances and increasing urbanization. The actions of these dogs are often seen as most precious when they come not from the result of training or domestication, but from some inner well of strength or power: a wolfish ancestry, an innate intelligence, or a capacity to love. By prizing these inherent qualities of the individual dog over their training methods or the strictures of civilization, authors showed their extreme cultural need for stories that promised that even workers or other oppressed subjects could be freed by landscape, place, and climate. Of course, in these stories, the actions of the dogs are useful more for human thought than for the animals themselves, leaving their actual agency up to question. Perhaps nothing illustrates this contradiction better than Balto’s final resting place in the zoo in Cleveland. A dog whose heroism was based on his work in a strenuous environment was sold numerous times, denying his own probable desires to return to his Northern home, and then left caged for the rest of his natural

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life, a living display, at the whim of children and adult humans. Balto’s cage is the ultimate expression of the conditionality of actual freedom for these Northern dogs, whose fictional freedom meant so much to so many readers.

THE SLAVE WHISPERER RIDES THE FRONTIER: HORSEFACE MINSTRELSY IN THE WESTERN J. J. Clark In his recent work of political satire, I Am America (And So Can You!), Stephen Colbert offers a comment on the nature of the human-animal relationship, writing: “[T]he single most important thing you can do as a human is to dominate an animal . . . It’s the best way to remind the animal kingdom who’s the boss. Plus, nothing is more satisfying than subjugating a lower creature to your will. When I tell my dog Gipper to fetch my slippers, I feel a sense of rightful empowerment, placing myself at the apex of Nature’s Org Chart.”1 Notably absent in Colbert’s passage is any sense of empathy for how Gipper feels about his status as a “lower creature.” If Colbert’s dog is anything like my old cow pony, Spanky, he probably does not enjoy subjugation. While I cannot speak to Gipper’s methodology with Colbert, Spanky enforced his policy of non-compliance through mostly passive (although sometimes active) resistance. His stubbornness was remarkable, and Spanky made it abundantly clear to any human with whom he was paired that he would much rather be his own horse and define his own mission than to capitulate to his rider. Spanky wanted the freedom to pursue his personal horse agenda of biting anyone foolish enough to come within reach and humping my donkey, Taco Bell. To say that the horse is essential to the western is like saying the thumb is essential to the hand. However, my partnership with Spanky reminds me that there is a stark difference between the actual behavior of horses and the behavior of the stereotypical western horse of literature, film, and television. These fictional horses are presented as celibate males who (among other things) are readily obedient and submissive to the cowboy, and who are completely devoted to the needs of the master, even to the point of willingly risking life and limb in service to those needs. This stereotypical western horse emerges fully-formed

1 Stephen Colbert, I Am America (And So Can You!) (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007), pp. 31, 33. Winner of the Stephen T. Colbert Award For The Literary Excellence.

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at the inception of the western as the inspiration for Owen Wister’s seminal work, The Virginian (1902).2 We also see these loyal horses in Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) and Wildfire (1917), and Max Brand’s Devil Horse (1922) and Galloping Danger (1923), among many, many others. In contemporary popular culture, this pattern of devoted service emerges in the Lone Ranger’s Silver, Gene Autry’s Champion, Roy Rogers’ Trigger, and Hidalgo from the film of the same name, all of whom willingly provide their cowboys rescue and aid at the risk of their own well-being. It is clear that many fictional western horses are no more “authentic” than the cowboys who ride them. However, these horses are homogeneously inauthentic from western to western, which has led me to believe that the western horse stereotype reflects a larger cultural impulse. Because the western genre emerged at the turn of the century alongside the already-popular genres of the plantation romance and minstrel show, and because all three of these wildly successful popculture forms invented and perpetuated many cultural stereotypes through the wide dissemination of ephemera and a generous amount of artistic borrowing, I suggest that a collaboration between these forms established the stereotype of the western horse through a re-tooling of the ubiquitous “devoted slave” or “Uncle Tom” stereotype. Reflecting upon the traits I have used to describe the stereotypical western horse as a faithful, celibate male, it should be evident that these traits could also be used to sum up the qualities of the devoted slave stereotype. In a rather short inventory, literary examples of this stereotype include Uncle Tom and Scipio in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Jim in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1885), and Carey in John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832). In popular culture, these traits are reflected in Uncle Rastus (the Cream of Wheat cook); Uncle Ben (from the rice of the same name); Uncle Billy in the 1935 Shirley Temple film, The Littlest Rebel; Uncle Remus in Walt Disney’s 1946 film, Song of the South; and, more recently, Morgan Freeman’s character, Hoke, in the 1989 film, Driving Miss Daisy.

2 Don D. Walker, “Wister, Roosevelt and James: A Note on the Western.” American Quarterly, (Volume 12, Number 3, autumn, 1960), pp. 358–66. Wister based The Virginian on a short story he had written about a horse.

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By transferring the traits of the Uncle Tom stereotype onto the stereotypical western horse, the genre western addresses the “Negro problem” by expunging African Americans from the construction of a new cultural identity within the context of the “untrammeled” postbellum space of the western frontier. However, as Toni Morrison points out, the African American experience is essential to American cultural identity, so it cannot simply be erased from our cultural artifacts—it must resurface in some way. I argue that “Uncle Horse,” as the cowboy’s most important piece of personal property, serves the white protagonist by providing a subordinate entity over which he can dominate, and provides a concrete affirmation of the cowboy’s own freedom and masculinity—a rhetorical function almost identical to that of the Uncle Tom stereotype of plantation romances and minstrel shows. This use of a nostalgic and empowering trope effectively places the white cowboy on top of a symbolic African American character (both literally and figuratively), a substitution that has the simultaneous effect of easing white anxieties over shifting racial positions and reinforcing collapsing racial boundaries for a nostalgic white audience. As it is with the devoted slave to the plantation master, the stereotype of the western horse is presented alongside the cowboy not as a true reflection of “horseness,” but as a performing caricature whose main function is to fortify strictly defined racial behaviors. Such racialization and personification of the western horse results in what I call “horseface minstrelsy,” or the human invention of an animal stereotype whose scripted performance does not reflect the reality of the actual horse, much in the same way that the derogatory African American stereotypes perpetuated through blackface minstrelsy do not reflect the reality of actual humans. Further, because the stereotype is drawn to appear as “authentic” as possible, culture at large grows to accept the stereotype as the genuine article. This collaboration between the actual and the imagined renders the two indistinguishable from one another. The animal is robbed of its agency, and soon the living horse is reduced in the cultural consciousness to little more than an animate version of its own stereotype. In examining the construction of western stereotypes, what is ignored in the development of the mythic west can sometimes be as telling as what is included. For example, even though there were tens of thousands of living and breathing African Americans who settled on the western frontier, that reality has been excluded from the genre western. Blake

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Allmendinger points out that if the predominantly white male writers of this genre chose to present African Americans at all, they were cast strictly in “secondary or stereotypical roles.”3 Roger D. Hardaway concurs, stating that “perhaps the biggest discrepancy between the myth and the reality of the cowboy legend was that the black cowboys were almost totally ignored by the mythmakers of the eastern publishing houses and the Hollywood movie sets.”4 However, to paraphrase Morrison, spaces that big are not usually left unfilled. In her book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison suggests that the African American experience has had such a profound impact on our national psychology that it simply must exist in our cultural artifacts, perhaps even hidden in plain sight, but probably so deeply encoded as to be practically invisible. Posing her discussion in the context of what she calls the ubiquitous “Africanist presence” in American literature, Morrison claims that in a nation that has struggled with racial issues since its inception, an African American presence will seep into all aspects of American cultural life, including its literature. Moreover, when the African American presence is ignored or omitted by a writer, this omission is more telling than any inclusion might be, perhaps even more so when the African American experience is pointedly excluded from a work which, historically speaking, should contain it. Morrison further helps us form an understanding of this rather curious cross-species collision between human and animal stereotypes when she explains that the frequently silent Africanist presence sometimes “occupies a territory between man and animal.”5 If, as I argue, the Africanist presence in the popular western does not register overtly in the form of a human character, Morrison’s analogy is useful in terms of interpreting the character of the horse as a dynamic representation of race encoded within the western genre. Here are a few names of faithful, celibate male horses that can almost go without comment: In Twain’s book A Horse’s Tale (1906), Buffalo Bill’s horse, Soldier Boy, is black and is called “Boy” for short; in Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, the horse who dies for Lassiter is

3 Blake Allmendinger, Imagining the African American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), p. xix. 4 Roger Hardaway, “African American Cowboys on the Western Frontier,” Negro History Bulletin (January–December 2001). 5 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 17, 39, 67–71.

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named Wrangle, which is presumably short for Wrangler, a name often used in reference to an African American cowboy; Lassiter’s own loyal blind horse is black as are Jane’s two horses, Black Star and Night, both of whom play an essential role in helping Lassiter to round up the bad guys; Lin Sloan’s utterly devoted black horse in Grey’s Wildfire is named Nagger (!) and is referred to as Lin’s “faithful black;” and to round out my list, there is Smokey, from Will James’ Smokey the Cow Horse (1927), whose name suggests his dark coloring, whose mother is referred to as his “mammy,” and who loves his freedom until the cowboy teaches him that he is better off serving a master. While it is not unreasonable to expect an author to give a dark-colored horse a name evocative of that coloring, it is worth remembering that these examples are fictional, so these horses can be any color or bear any name the writer chooses; this incomplete list serves to illustrate those choices, which leads me to believe that something is going on here at the symbolic level as surely as the hero wears a white hat. Of course, none of this is to suggest that the character of the western horse is symbolic only in matters of race. For instance, in her book, Hoofbeats and Society, Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence suggests that the wild mustang in western fiction is emblematic of the vanishing frontier and humankind’s love-hate relationship with nature.6 Additionally, some western horses serve as an unmistakable metaphor for the Native American condition, and some of these fictional animals help to construct the mythological “cowboy code” of chivalry prevalent in these works. Frequently there are different levels of symbolism at play between cowboys and their horses and cowgirls and their horses, and in more contemporary examples of the western, women and minority writers often deploy the symbol of the horse differently than the “founding fathers” of the genre. That said, the aforementioned list of names seems to indicate that we must expand our understanding of the western horse stereotype to include this character as a representation of Morrison’s Africanist presence in the genre western. In my list, I elected not to include one of the most famous fictional horses of all time because he is not a western horse. I am speaking, of course, of Black Beauty, or “little darkie” as he is called repeatedly in Anna Sewell’s novel. The full title of this work

6 Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, Hoofbeats and Society: Studies of Human-Horse Interaction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 64.

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is Black Beauty, His Grooms and Companions, The Autobiography of a Horse as Translated From the Original Equine by Anna Sewell. The title of the text, as well as the fact that the story is told in the first person (first horse, actually) from Black Beauty’s point of view, clearly reflects Sewell’s intent to evoke the genre of the slave narrative—a form of abolitionist writing that was still exceedingly popular when Black Beauty was first published in 1877. Picking up on this connection, Sewell’s critics dubbed her book, “The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the horse,” which provides us with yet another example of how easily the condition of the slave overlaps with the condition of the horse during the years leading up to the emergence of the genre western.7 Western or not, Black Beauty’s story helps to emphasize that, in addition to the many other legitimate and fascinating interpretations of this iconic animal, we must also consider the horse as a stand-in for the slave. Horseface Minstrelsy The symbolic “mash-up” between the devoted slave stereotype and the western horse stereotype occurs in the wake of the Civil War alongside the simultaneous “close” of several cultural institutions which, by the very nature of their closing, leaves them “open” for nostalgic reconfiguration. In what is perhaps the most famous of these reconfigurations, Frederick Jackson Turner employs the rhetorical strategy of “closing” the western frontier, thereby simultaneously “opening” up the West for a wistful re-remembering.8 In Turner’s new paradigm, the West becomes a blank canvas ready to be embellished with a new, unifying frontier mythology steeped in nostalgia and marked by a collision between the sanitized truth and the outright imaginary. Thus, many turn of the century Americans experienced nostalgia for a “vanished” frontier that they knew only through “realistic” dime westerns and “authentic” wild west shows. In his essay, “Ten Gallon Hero,” David B. Davis explains how a shared nostalgia between North and South collaborates to fill out the emerging western mythology. Davis calls this “a recasting of the golden

7 Peter Stoneley, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Black Beauty.” C. 1999 by the Regents of the University of California, pp. 65–67. 8 Jennifer Moskowitz, “The Cultural Myth of the Cowboy, or, How the West Was Won,” Americana: The Journal of Popular Culture (1900–present) (Volume 5, Issue 1, spring 2006), pp. 5–6.

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myth of the antebellum South,” arguing that this “literary synthesis of two traditions”—the western and plantation romance—were “fused” sometime in the 1890’s, just as Turner declared the frontier closed.9 Notably, as evidence of this collaboration, Davis specifically cites the transference of the stereotypical plantation master’s southern chivalry onto the stereotype of the cowboy, illustrating how cultural nostalgia for the imaginary west converged with a growing cultural nostalgia for the similarly “closed” tradition of southern plantation culture. Like the frontier west, as the plantation culture of the South had “closed,” it opened itself up for nostalgic reinterpretation as a golden period of idyllic country happiness at the old plantation home. The injustices of slavery were replaced with fantastical images of happy, singing slaves who showed utter devotion to the master and the missus.10 This imaginative transition is probably best-evidenced by the explosion in popularity of minstrel shows, in which a white man could make a fortune donning grotesque blackface makeup and staging demeaning portrayals of African Americans by performing “coon songs” for a receptive white audience. Race relations at the turn of the century were volatile, and the proliferation of such derogatory stereotypes and the readiness with which they were embraced highlighted the dominant culture’s anxieties within “a racial structure whose ideological and psychological instability required its boundaries continually to be staged.”11 It is important to note that there were cultural critics who spoke out against such outlandish racism, but if the popularity of this form of entertainment can be taken as any indicator, it is likewise fair to say that those protests were largely blacked out by a layer of burnt cork.12 This turn of the century “psychological instability” manifested itself, in part, through images that merged African Americans with animals of all sorts—a trend that is especially evident in minstrel shows and coon songs that equate African Americans with crows, dogs, ducks, raccoons, apes, etc. Turn of the century advertisers piggybacked onto this craze by producing a seemingly endless variety of ephemera decorated with

9 David B. Davis, “Ten-Gallon Hero,” American Quarterly (Volume 6, Number 2, summer 1954), pp. 112–14. 10 J. Stanley Lemons, “Black Stereotypes as Reflected in Popular Culture, 1880–1920,” American Quarterly (Volume 29, Number 1, spring 1977), p. 110. 11 Eric Lott, “Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy.” Representations (Number 39, summer 1992), p. 27. 12 Burnt cork was used to blacken the faces of white men performing in blackface.

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grotesque images of African Americans as animals.13 More to my point, African Americans were frequently caricatured as horses, mules, and donkeys—beasts of burden who are the very symbols of submission. These covertly racist caricatures were deployed for overtly racist purposes, such as in the 1884 Currier and Ives advertising print entitled “A Literary Debate in the Darktown Club,” which presents a cartoon rendering of several African American politicians who have been given derogatory names and whose faces have been superimposed onto the bodies of donkeys. In the foreground is a horseshoe-shaped yoke of roses which will presumably be hung, race-horse style, around the neck of whichever politician wins the debate.14 Equally telling is the popular turn of the century practice of naming horses, donkeys and mules after derogatory terms for African American people. A search of on-line horse registries going back to the 19th century includes horse after horse with names like Darkie, Coon, and worse. Also, a quick internet search produces numerous examples and images from the period showing horses similarly named. One of the most striking of these images is the 1883 Frank Jay Haynes photo taken to commemorate the Villard excursion’s last spike ceremony in Gold Creek, Montana that marked the completion of Northern Pacific Railroad’s first transcontinental line. The photo shows a burly black horse pulling a railroad trolley loaded with iron train track. The horse wears a sign reading “My Name is NIG,” and the photo is entitled, “Iron Car-Horse NIG and Tracklayers.”15 This insensitive association between African Americans and horses had historical roots and was driven by a nostalgia for a lost racial order that traditionally assigned African Americans a co-status with horses as chattel on the southern plantation. Frederick Douglass writes that during the valuation phase of a slave and livestock auction, African American women were valuated with the cattle and their children with the pigs, and African American men were valuated with the horses.16 Adding to

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Lemons, 104. Dawn E. Reno, The Encyclopedia of Black Collectibles: A Value and Identification Guide (Radnor: Wallace-Homestead, 1996), p. 17. 15 Gerald Lang and Lee Marks, The Horse: Photographic Images, 1839 To The Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), p. 46. 16 Henry Louis Gates Jr. and William L. Andrews, Slave Narratives (New York: The Library of America, 2000). “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself (1845),” p. 312. 14

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the association, both culturally and in the literature, African American slaves were intimately associated with the care and training of horses in antebellum plantation culture. In a culture steeped in horseracing, a good stable was a source of pride for the southern plantation master. Thus, securing a position as a groom, coachman, farrier, stable boy, or jockey was coveted work for a slave on the plantation because accessibility to the stable indicated that a slave had gained the favor and the trust of his master. These jobs often earned a slave respect and good treatment, and gave him status among his peers.17 Predictably, we see this historical association between African Americans and horses reflected in the literature of the time. In Kennedy’s Swallow Barn, for instance, Meriwether frequently describes slaves and slavery in terms of horses, and his dutiful slave, Carey, is charged with the care of the plantation’s cherished blooded horses.18 In Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, there are no less than four references to slave auctions in which the examination of the slaves for sale is directly related to the examination of horses. Uncle Tom himself is in charge of St. Clare’s horses and lives in an apartment above the stables. He spends much of his time carrying little Eva on his own back as if he were a horse, and he is referred to as her “faithful bearer.” Other slaves in Stowe’s work make a practice of calling one another “hoss,” and the escaped slave George associates his condition directly with that of plantation horses when he states that he meant no more to his master than a fine horse.19 Into this racially charged climate was born the genre western, and right away we can see proof of Davis’ claim that nostalgia for plantation culture likewise helps to fill out the developing myth of the frontier west. Even as it emerges, the western tradition hearkens to the minstrel craze in significant ways. For example, minstrel shows typically had equestrian sections that mirrored the horse tricks commonly performed in wild west shows, and wild west shows had parades of people dancing wildly in outlandish costumes that mirrored the parades prevalent in

17 Larry Vincent Buster, The Art and History of Black Memorabilia (New York: Clarkson/Potter, 2000), pp. 151–53. 18 John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1962), p. 448. Originally published in 1853. 19 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1852. Reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 2003), pp. 135, 261, 379–80; 172, 210, 247; 333; 54; 491.

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the minstrel tradition.20 A popular carnival game at wild west shows involved “spending a nickel to throw three baseballs at a black man’s head sticking out of a hole in a wall of canvas,”21 which was also a common form of entertainment at minstrel shows. In Wister’s The Virginian, considered to be the progenitor of the western, the protagonist sings a coon song that references Jim Crow, a popular minstrel stereotype.22 In terms of more contemporary examples, western comedians Will Rogers and Smiley Burnette both have films in which they perform in blackface. Gene Autry, arguably one of the most famous singing cowboys of all time, got his start performing not in wild west shows, but in minstrel shows; not only was his yodeling informed by the minstrel tradition, his “cowboy” songs were directly modeled upon coon songs.23 As revealing as some of this cultural borrowing is, the most telling collaboration between the western and the minstrel traditions rests with the development of the western horse stereotype as a frontier manifestation of certain derogatory African American stereotypes. In light of Davis’ claim that the stereotype of the cowboy is a frontier incarnation of the southern plantation master stereotype, it does seem logical to suggest that the predictable repository for the devoted slave stereotype is the cowboy’s horse, especially considering the pre-existing cultural impulse to associate African Americans with horses. When we further take into account Lawrence’s assertion that horses are often associated with “boundary marking in human life experience,”24 we get a clear picture of how a hybridization between the western horse and the devoted slave stereotypes would help to shore up racial boundaries for a white audience uneasy with shifting racial roles. Like the white performer in blackface, when a horse exhibits trick behavior or personality traits that are not an earnest reflection of “horseness,” that horse performs an act of horseface minstrelsy. In terms of the function of this new horse stereotype, such horseface performances result in a condition in which any sort of genuine relationship that might exist between the human

20 James H. Dorman, “Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The ‘Coon Song’ Phenomenon of the Gilded Age.” American Quarterly (Volume 40, Number 4, December 1988), pp. 452–53. 21 Paul Reddin, Wild West Shows (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), p. 65. 22 Owen Wister, The Virginian (New York: Macmillan 1902. Reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005), p. 162. 23 Peter Stanfield, Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930’s Singing Cowboy (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 1, 6, 118, 104, 63. 24 Lawrence, 185.

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and the horse is subverted in favor of a jig-dancing, trick-performing caricature of the animal used solely for the purposes of entertainment, or to reflect upon the character of the human protagonist. This overlap between the western horse and the minstrel tradition is relatively direct. For instance, most people are familiar with the minstrel character of Jim Crow—a derogatory African American stereotype that imagines the black man as a lazy, ill-mannered thief who spends all of his time dreaming up ways to avoid doing any work.25 Jim Crow’s western counterpart is reflected in the character of the “plug horse.” In the wild west show version, the audience is presented with a horse or donkey who performs a comedic scene as a lazy thief, similar to Jim Crow. The plug horse “steals” items from the cowboy (bandanna, hat, gun belt), and performs a series of tricks (such as escaping out of his saddle and bridle) to get out of doing any jobs the cowboy might require.26 The plug horse first appears in the literature of the West in one of Twain’s most famous scenes in Roughing It, which revolves around the protagonist’s purchase of just such an insolent plug horse.27 Twain, who devoted an entire chapter of his autobiography to blackface performances,28 again borrows from minstrelsy to create the horse character of Soldier Boy in his story, A Horse’s Tale. In this instance, Twain borrows from the minstrel character, Zip Coon, who is known for his awkward, shuffling, strutting, high-stepping dances—strange movements that were mirrored in trick horse performances in wild west shows which presented outlandishly dressed, well-trained horses exhibiting all manners of irregular high-stepping gaits, strutting tricks, and “dance” moves. Zip Coon is equally renowned for his outrageous clothes and his habit of misusing language for comedic effect. 29 Notably, Twain’s Soldier Boy is a horse who is vain about his personal appearance and who puts on airs and acts elegant, but whose comic nature is revealed through the malapropisms which he uses to impress his fellow animals as a sophisticate, such as when he boasts that he is the “best educated horse outside of the hippodrome,” and makes much of his noble “part

25

Dorman, 452. Reddin, 73. 27 Mark Twain, Roughing It (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Originally published in 1872), p. 158. 28 Lott, 31. 29 Dorman, 451. 26

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blue grass and part fossil” lineage, mistaking the word “fossil” for a breed of storied horses.30 This culturally significant redrawing of the horse is possible at this historical moment because the human/horse relationship, like the western frontier and the plantation culture that came before, is also in the process of becoming a “closed” institution. By using the loaded phrase “fossil” to describe Soldier Boy, Twain underscores just such a close. Due to rapid changes in human transportation technology at the end of the 19th century, in addition to the condition of increasing urbanization and industrialization nationwide, Americans at this time believed that they were witnessing the beginning of the end of the longstanding relationship between humans and horses.31 As it was with the “vanished” western frontier and “idyllic” southern plantation life, the horse as a “closed” historic relic becomes an empty space ready to be nostalgically reconfigured. For the dominant, racially troubled postbellum culture that had already associated images of African Americans with horses, it must have seemed intuitive to assuage their nostalgia for the vanishing horse by “filling” this “empty” character with the similarly nostalgic characteristics of the devoted slave stereotype, then to use this new horse stereotype to “fill up” the nostalgic space of the closed western frontier. Because nostalgia and accuracy rarely walk hand-in-hand, it mattered little that the northern white inventers and performers of blackface minstrelsy and their mostly white audiences had almost no practical association with actual black people.32 In a strikingly similar way, the inventors of the western genre were, by and large, from the East, and had very little practical experience in matters of the western frontier, including the western horse.33 Thus, the impulse to sample generously from stereotypical characters who already existed in other pop-culture forms was a practical one, and the western writer’s clever strategy of replacing the devoted slave stereotype with an animal stereotype allowed even readers who might have opposed African American slavery to freely enjoy the masculine value of benevolent coercion without the 30

Mark Twain, “A Horse’s Tale.” Harper’s (August and September 1906), pp. 2–3. Barney Nelson, The Wild and the Domestic: Animal Representation, Ecocriticsm, and Western American Literature (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000), p. 38. 32 Lemons, 110. 33 Allmendinger, 76. Owen Wister was a banker in New York and a lawyer in Philadelphia, Pearl Zane Grey was a dentist in New York, and Frederick Faust (AKA Max Brand) loathed horses. 31

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moral complexities that come along with forced human bondage. After all, in the freedom-loving West, the cowboy’s human sidekick simply cannot fill the role of “devoted slave” without violating the conventions of the genre. Tonto and the Lone Ranger may not exist on a level playing field, but unlike Silver, Tonto is allowed both a voice and an opinion. Moreover, the Lone Ranger does not determine Tonto’s name, what and when Tonto eats and sleeps, what Tonto wears, whether or not Tonto can visit his tribe, or how or whether Tonto benefits from his labor. Nor is Tonto whipped, branded, ear clipped, castrated, or hobbled at the end of the day so he cannot run away. As with the slave to the master, this submissive role can only be filled by something that serves as a piece of personal property to the cowboy, and that property is the cowboy’s horse. Uncle Horse While the Jim Crow and Zip Coon comparisons are telling, the minstrel tradition best reflects upon the condition of the stereotypical western horse through the persistence of the derogatory Uncle Tom stereotype. While there were earlier literary precedents, the Uncle Tom stereotype first emerges under that name in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a work which was not only enormously popular during its time, but which also spawned a frenzy of blackface minstrel shows that were performed in the tradition of the original, though they resembled it little. Again, the lure of the minstrel tradition for a turn of the century white audience rests with the reinforcement of collapsing racial boundaries,34 so while Stowe’s original work of fiction promoted the abolition of slavery, the minstrel “Tom Shows” portrayed African Americans as content and even complicit in their enslavement. “Tom Shows” were by far the most popular blackface entertainments of the day,35 and the derogatory Uncle Tom stereotype epitomizes how minstrel shows and coon songs advocated for the continuing subordination of African Americans, and served as a means by which to maintain “the domination of white over 34

Lott, 23. Jim Comer, “Every Time I Turn Around: Rite Reversal, and the End of Blackface Minstrelsy.” http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/links/comer/, p. 6. The first black character in American film appeared in 1903 in a twelve-minute Edwin S. Porter adaptation of Stowe’s work, but the part of Uncle Tom, ironically, was played by a white actor in blackface. 35

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black,”36 reinforcing the white subject’s view of themselves as “superior, controlling, not to say owning figures.”37 The western horse stereotype appears to give the white subject a coded means by which to maintain a similar sense of racial superiority, perhaps most notably in the way that tropes of Uncle Tom’s enslavement are superimposed upon the situation of the horse. In The Virginian, Wister gives us an early example of horseface minstrelsy when the horse, Pedro, responds to the cowboy, Shorty, by coming to his whistle and shaking hands on cue.38 More tellingly, Wister adapts narrative strategies from Stowe’s novel, transferring Uncle Tom’s condition to the horse, Pedro.39 For instance, Shorty has to pawn his beloved Pedro because of financial indiscretions that are very similar to those which force Shelby to sell Uncle Tom in Stowe’s novel. Moreover, Shelby and Shorty are both heartbroken at having to sell their friends as chattel, and both make vows to purchase back their respective pieces of property the moment their finances will permit it. Pedro and Tom both fall into the hands of men who are merciless and brutal, and when the masters return to purchase back their respective charges, they find that they are too late—in each instance, their beloved companions have died as a result of the cruelties visited upon them by their new owners. As this brief comparison reveals, violence in the form of beatings and breakings permeate both the genre western and traditional southern romances and minstrel shows. The popularity of the slave-breaking scenes that appeared in nearly every minstrel show and plantation romance reveals the anxieties of the dominant white culture to “control” a subordinate-but-intelligent-other as a result of what they viewed as a deteriorating racial situation, which likewise helps to explain the outrageous popularity of the submissive Uncle Tom stereotype.40 Both the Uncle Tom stereotype and slave breaking scenes were favorites of turn of the century white audiences because both eased white anxiety over shifting racial roles, and both reflected a deep desire to have white masculine superiority constantly staged and reaffirmed. Slave breaking scenes in particular reinforced a white masculine code in which the

36

Dorman, 466. Lott, 28. 38 Wister, 214. 39 Kenneth Alan Hovey, “Wister’s Life Among the Lowly and Anglocentrism.” Western American Literature (winter 2005), pp. 395–417. 40 Stoneley, 63–64. 37

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heroic plantation master breaks his slaves benevolently and is rewarded by the slaves’ subsequent loyal devotion, while the villainous master breaks his slaves malevolently and suffers destruction. Stowe not only enacts these opposing poles in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but she makes the superiority of one over the other explicit when the furious Eva berates her cousin, warning him that he must no longer call her “dear Eva” because she has witnessed the young man beating his slaves in violation of the masculine code of benevolent coercion.41 In an eerily similar passage from Wister’s novel, the Virginian warns Balaam, “Don’t you call me your friend,” because Balaam has abused Pedro in violation of the “cowboy code” of kindness to horses. Indeed, in the very first act of violence in the novel, the Virginian nearly kills Balaam with his bare hands over the mistreatment of Pedro.42 Through Balaam and the Virginian’s actions, the reader can see that, as it was with the treatment of slaves in the plantation romance, the treatment of horses in the western reflects upon the masculinity of the protagonist. Notably, Wister opens his novel with a horse breaking scene, illustrating that just as slave breaking scenes were a staple of the minstrel show, horse breaking scenes were central to the development of the white masculine code that dominates much of western mythology. In fact, rarely does one find a western in which the cowboy does not have to prove himself by contending with an unruly horse, and the reader of the western knows that if the cowboy breaks his horse in an appropriately benevolent way, he is a “good guy,” and his horse rewards him with dutiful submission. If, however, the cowboy is abusive to his horse, he is a “bad guy,” and his horse will respond with rebellious behavior. Grey reveals as much in Valley of Wild Horses when he says that “Cowboys were of an infinite variety of types, yet they all fell under two classes: Those who were brutal with horses and those who were gentle.”43 A closer examination of the way slave breaking scenes foreshadow horse breaking scenes shows how the baton of white masculinity passes from one genre to the next. In one of the most compelling episodes in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, St. Clare relates to Marie and Eva the story of capturing and breaking a runaway slave, Scipio—a slave none had been able to master. St. Clare describes Scipio’s near-mythic strength of 41

Stowe, 303. Wister, 223, 226–67. 43 Zane Grey, Valley of Wild Horses (Philadelphia: Curtis Publishing Company, 1927. Reprint, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), p. 176. 42

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body and will, the massive and violent manhunt for Scipio, the wounding of Scipio, and Scipio’s eventual recovery due to St. Clare’s devoted medical care. Notably, St. Clare does not dominate Scipio through violence. Instead, it is through kindness and patience that St. Clare brings Scipio back into the fold, turning him into the most loyal companion St. Clare has ever had. St. Clare even offers Scipio his freedom, but Scipio has grown to understand his submissive position to St. Clare, and he accepts his enslavement. Of course, consistent with the Uncle Tom formula, Scipio dies while saving St. Clare’s life.44 Compare this example with a scene appearing in Max Brand’s Galloping Danger, in which Lee Garrison tells Sally McGuire the dramatic story of how he captured and broke his horse, Moonshine, who is described in heroic terms similar to those used to describe the mythic Scipio. As with Scipio, trapping Moonshine involves an epic and violent hunt, and as with Scipio, Moonshine is injured as Garrison attempts his capture. Predictably, Garrison then eschews violence and instead tenderly nurses Moonshine back to health, gentling him down for domestic use before ultimately offering the horse his freedom. As did Scipio before him, Moonshine refuses his manumission, accepts his subjugation, and then dies in service to Garrison.45 In St. Clare’s story of breaking Scipio and in Lee Garrison’s story of breaking Moonshine, anxieties concerning collapsing racial boundaries are revealed through the white male protagonist’s desire to coerce and dominate a creature perceived to be a powerful threat, and through the subjugated creature’s “appropriate” submission at the hand of the master’s benevolent coercion. Like St. Clare breaking Scipio, Garrison must properly break Moonshine so the horse develops respect for his place in the social hierarchy, whether Moonshine initially agrees to the breaking or not. As with Scipio before him, Moonshine has no capacity to govern himself or decide what is in own his best interest, and because Garrison knows that the horse will be happier when he is “civilized,” he views it as a moral obligation to benevolently coerce Moonshine, and he tries to remind himself that if Moonshine rebels, it is because he was probably abused by someone else and simply does not know any

44

Stowe 265–67. Max Brand, Galloping Danger (New York: Street and Smith Publications Inc. 1923. Reprint, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), pp. 168–71. 45

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better. The master, as simultaneous helper and enslaver,46 illustrates his manliness through the use of abiding kindness and “superior intellect” to convince his charge to go along with his subjugation,47 a “moral” requirement common to both slavery and the cowboy code. It seems apparent that the transference of the racialized literary trope of “breaking” from the plantation romance to the western is designed to encode a racial presence in the ostensibly homogenous national frontier. The stereotypes deployed in westerns remain remarkably consistent into the new millennium, becoming exceedingly mobile across genres along the way, and Uncle Horse appears as popular as ever. I have mentioned Silver, Trigger, Champion, and Hidalgo as examples, but there are others that reflect a more subliminal cultural impulse that I find fascinating. In the instance of NBC’s 2008 remake of the 1982 series Knight Rider, Val Kilmer voices the character of KITT, a souped up (male) car who, in true Uncle Horse fashion, spends every episode zooming around providing service and rescue to his white male driver. Of course, the car selected to represent KITT is a black Ford mustang. Evidence of the deployment of Uncle Horse can also be seen through choices in voice casting for animated films. These casting choices provide yet another window into this subliminal cultural impulse precisely because the visual representation of a character in an animated film does not necessarily have to reflect the appearance of the actor providing the voice of the character. Thus, the choice to cast the African American comedian Chris Rock as the voice of Marty the Zebra in the 2005 animated feature, Madagascar, is at least interesting,48 as is the decision to cast African American comedian Eddie Murphy as the voice of Donkey in the Shrek movies. And if I am to believe that it is merely a coincidence that the role of Shrek’s equine sidekick is voiced by an African American, then what am I to make of the choice to cast African American performer Chester Gregory II as Donkey in the forthcoming Broadway stage version of Shrek?49 The Uncle Horse stereotype even appears to be subliminally deployed on American city streets in the form of police horses and mounted 46 Susan M. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 41. 47 Jennifer Mason, Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 35. 48 DreamWorks Animation, 2005. 49 DreamWorks Animation, 2001, 2004, 2007.

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officers. Lawrence writes that the police officer’s unwavering control over his horse symbolizes his ability to dominate the horse’s inherent wildness, which offers comfort to the public at large because they feel that such control illustrates that “all is well with their existing order.”50 This attitude does not appear to be racially charged until you compare it to the strikingly similar rhetorical function of the plantation master/slave relationship in minstrelsy. When Lawrence’s observation is then paired with the fact that these mounted units have strict size, sex, and color guidelines for their mounts and will only ride large, gelded, black or dark brown horses, the racial undercurrent appears even more evident.51 These mounted units even go so far as to turn away highly qualified donation horses that do not color conform, claiming that lighter colored horses are mentally inferior and are not taken seriously by the general public—a view that is not shared by mounted police units worldwide, many of whom successfully make use of light colored horses.52 Lawrence also includes photos in this section of her book, most of which show white male police officers mounted on black or dark brown horses, including her cover photo, which portrays a mounted officer practicing crowd control upon citizens of color.53 Upon viewing this photo, I wondered if a minority crowd might not have a different symbolic interpretation of a white male officer dominating his big, black, castrated horse, especially in light of the troubled racial history between police and minorities in many urban American settings. The Slave Whisperer According to Morrison, not only are our most noble traits appropriated for the construction of a national image, so too are our most base of impulses projected onto our national identity. She explains that an emphasis on racial difference “provided a huge payout of sign, symbol, and agency in the process of organizing, separating, and consolidating identity along culturally valuable lines of interest.”54 She is convinced

50

Lawrence, 121. Lawrence, 134–36, 139. 52 For example, the Metropolitan Police of London, Mounted Branch, make full use of white and light-colored horses. http://www.met.police.uk/mountedbranch/index .htm. 53 Lawrence, 131. 54 Morrison, 35, 39. 51

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that metaphorical representations of race run rampant across the culture and exists within the very fabric of our national character, writing, “Africanism is inextricable from the definition of Americanness—from its origins on through its integrated or disintegrating twentieth-century self.”55 Disintegrating, indeed. After all, transferring the traits of a human character onto an animal character is rarely to the benefit of the human, especially when such stereotypes are, according to Steve Baker, “deployed either to bolster our own sense of identity or to undermine that of others.” He also points out that “the casting of a hated or despised human into the role or image of an animal is . . . a very frequent and effective means of stereotyping them, of objectifying them, and of rendering them inferior.”56 The persistence of the Uncle Horse stereotype in literature and film plays out in much the same way as the persistence of the similarly encoded stereotypes perpetuated through the minstrel tradition—eventually we grow to believe the stereotype over the reality. According to James Dorman, minstrel shows and coon songs produced between 1890 and 1910 aggressively claimed to portray “real” African American culture,57 even though the images put forth promoted a “thoroughgoing unfamiliarity with ‘real’ blacks,” and helped to advance “the acceptance of stereotypes developed out of racial prejudice.”58 Dorman goes on to say that the acceptance of such stereotypes “underlay a major shift in white perception of blacks; a shift whereby existing stereotypes came to be either confirmed or embellished and indelibly encoded as part of the semiotic system of the period.” He asserts, “Over and over the dominant themes [are] repeated and reiterated until the variant images [are] rendered indelible, at least in their primary forms,”59 explaining how such constant exposure to errant and derogatory imagery encourages its viewers to internalize the stereotype, thereby making it a part of the cultural “history” and “reality.” Once the stereotype is accepted as authentic, it becomes more and more difficult for audiences to distinguish between historical fact and fantastical imagery. Reality does not play much of a role in the

55

Morrison, 63, 65. Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 91, 113. 57 Dorman, 454. 58 Dorman, 464. 59 Dorman, 450, 466. 56

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construction of a national mythology, but it is essential for the mythology to appear “real” because the more realistic the mythology, the more palatable, historical, and traditional the unifying cultural message will appear. As a result, it becomes increasingly challenging over time to tell where the collaboration between the imagined and the actual begins or ends. Take, for example, the comparably bizarre, distinctly western collision between reality and fantasy in the story of Sitting Bull’s horse. As with the plantation romance and the minstrel tradition before it, claims of authenticity were essential to the western tradition, and according to Buffalo Bill, his wild west show was “reality itself.”60 He was right in that even as actual, real battles were still going on between the U.S. Calvary and Native Americans, actual, real Native Americans were serving as performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, including the Sioux Chief, Sitting Bull. After working for a year as a performer, Sitting Bull returned to the Standing Rock Agency in South Dakota, where it was feared that he would strengthen the Ghost Dance movement, so U.S. Indian Affairs authorities ordered his arrest. A gunfight ensued, and Sitting Bull was shot and killed. During the battle, Sitting Bull’s horse (named Blackie, of course), who Sitting Bull had used in his performances in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, mistook all of the gunshots for stage cues; Blackie began performing his routine of tricks and dance steps right on the battlefield next to his dying master, hindering Sitting Bull’s escape and possibly contributing to his death.61 Mirroring the efforts of pop culture to attribute a level of “authenticity” to demeaning and disturbing African American stereotypes, we can see from Blackie’s example that the power of the symbolic animal is likewise entirely reliant on how “realistically” the animal character is portrayed.62 It is important that animals appear “real” as they perform unrealistic feats, so that when they display nonrealistic characteristics, their behavior seems real to the audience. The slippage between reality and fantasy becomes even more difficult to track when cultural agents intentionally construct the stereotype to appear as “authentic” as possible. As it is with the internalization of derogatory African American stereotypes, the essence of the real horse is lost and replaced with

60

Reddin, 61. Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the Whitehouse: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 143. 62 Mary Allen, Animals in American Literature (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 6. 61

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something that looks like a horse, but does not act like a horse, and the real animal then becomes “a construction, a representation, and not an accessible essence or reality.”63 Consider the 2004 Touchstone/Disney film Hidalgo, which provides a contemporary example of a horse performing in horseface. In a film named for a horse, which proposes to be an “authentic” reflection of the special uniqueness of one horse, five horses had to be used in the production of the film to play Hidalgo. In a practice that is hauntingly reminiscent of blackface, a makeup artist was employed specifically to spray paint and airbrush makeup onto the five horses in order to make them look identical. In fact, over 800 horses were shipped as cargo to Morocco, in very difficult and cramped conditions on boats and planes, enduring distress and respiratory hardships in the harsh desert conditions in order to perform in a film designed to romanticize and sentimentalize the human/horse relationship. This is all according to the special features presentation on the Hidalgo DVD, which also presents the head horse trainer discussing how hard they worked to make all of this “fun” for the horses. While I do not doubt the sincerity of the trainer, nor his efforts to treat the horses in his care benevolently, I remain unconvinced that horses shipped as cargo to a far-away desert, then painted with food coloring upon their arrival, then forced to perform stunts for the camera in overwhelming heat and sandstorms, are having “fun.” I understand the risks that go along with associating the condition of animals with that of human slavery, but it is difficult not to make that association when the behavior of the humans in this equation so closely mirrors the behavior of those who offered justification for forced human bondage. It was not uncommon for slave holders to defend the institution of slavery by claiming that the slaves had “fun” performing their tasks, and that they were well treated and “happy,” and desirous of continued enslavement. Further, it was not uncommon for slave holders to claim a condition of enslavement themselves, due to the fact that they were so heavily burdened with responsibilities related to the continued happiness and physical well-being of those they subjugated.64 As Colbert satirically puts it: “When I order Gipper to sit, I’m letting him know that I am his superior. Of course, Gipper has a bad back, so

63

Baker, xviii, 4, 5. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 339. 64

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after I ask him to sit, I massage his hindquarters while I ease him onto a pillow.”65 In this way, Colbert enacts his dominance without losing his “human decency” as a responsible master. And so, we laugh. While it can be amusing, the act of creating outlandish stereotypes of animals that we deploy time and again to the general public creates a “problematic fantasy”66 that harms our relationship with animals by robbing them of their agency. Moreover, our acceptance of the fantasy encourages us to understand the animal itself only through the symbol we have created.67 Using animal stereotypes in this fashion is just one of the many ways we humans subordinate other animals to advance our own agenda, which is a fact we should take care not to minimize. I cannot emphasize this enough: To deny that the human animal is an animal who subordinates other animals is to deny an essential marker of our own animality. We manipulate the very genetics of our fellow beings. Mustangs in the wild do not gallop around the chaparral herding bovines—that is a skill that has been bred and trained into them by humans for the benefit of humans. Or, to use one of Lawrence’s wonderfully ironic examples, after tens of thousands of years of humans breeding horses to be docile, the rodeo industry is now in engaged in the very lucrative business of breeding the buck back into the horse for better rodeo performances and increased rodeo attendance.68 It is true that top horses and their human companions who engage in activities like racing, roping, or cutting cattle are deeply in tune with each other and respond with respect and trust to the cues each sends the other, horse to rider, rider to horse. I have no doubt that each creature has real affection for the other, and that both creatures genuinely enjoy the practices in which they engage. But it is likewise prudent to remind ourselves that humans have selectively bred horses for 10,000 years so their brains now reflect these qualities—and not for the advancement of the horse, but for the benefit of the human. That said, I would also point out that investing an inappropriate amount of (strangely human-like) subjectivity to the horse is problematic for similar reasons, and humans have to be equally vigilant against convincing themselves that the horse could ride the cowboy, if the horse

65

Colbert, 38. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p. 39. 67 Baker, xvi. 68 Lawrence, 93. 66

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felt so inclined. The horse does not “ask” for subjugation, and the horse is not complicit in it. Otherwise, we would not have verbs like “breaking,” “taming,” and “training,” not to mention equipment like bridles and bits and spurs and whips. Humans must constantly bear in mind that the horse was never given the opportunity to decline to participate in the human/horse relationship, nor does the horse possess the capacity to exit the relationship. Suggesting that the horse does possess this sort of agency is to suggest that it is within the control of the horse to defend itself against abuses through a termination of the human/horse relationship. The implication is that by not exiting the relationship, the horse is satisfied with its treatment at the hands of the human, which in turn gives humanity permission to overlook any exploitation of the horse. Thus, to misidentify the amount of power the horse wields in the human/horse relationship is to exaggerate the ability of Horse to defend Horsekind against human abuse. Creating fantastic stereotypes of animals who enjoy nothing more than being subjugated is problematic for real animals because such stereotypes imply that animals are happily compliant with their manipulation by humans. This causes us to disassociate from the true consciousness of the real animal. Humans—who grow increasingly distant from nature with each passing day—embrace these fantastical animal stereotypes because the stereotypes allow us to rationalize an increasingly consumerist and disposable lifestyle which actually endangers animals and destroys the very environment in which they live. Further, by perpetuating the myth that animals are willingly complicit in their own subjugation, we give ourselves the means by which to neutralize and overlook all manners of brutality heaped upon these “happy” animals. As a result, humans can indulge in worshipping at the altar of Sea Biscuit, Secretariat, and Barbaro while ignoring the multitudes of abuses heaped upon thoroughbreds in the U.S. horse racing industry—according to the industry’s own records, thoroughbred tracks reported an average of more than three horse fatalities a day in 2008, and there have been over 5000 deaths reported since 2003.69 For similar reasons, menopausal women can take Premarin (pregnant mare’s urine) to relieve their hot flashes without giving much consideration to the 80,000 mares who

69 “Survey: 5000 Deaths Since ’03.” Los Angeles Times. Associated Press article, June 15, 2008.

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live their lives in small laboratory stalls attached to urine-harvesting machines. And when North American wild mustangs are rounded up wholesale and exterminated, it is easier for humans to give themselves permission to overlook that sad reality in favor of the stereotypical horse which has been so powerfully and frequently conveyed through our cultural artifacts. We humans may be uncomfortable with the way we treat these horses, but the solution is not to comfort ourselves by inventing inauthentic animal stereotypes like Uncle Horse that help us to abdicate our responsibility. The fact that humans have created an environment in which certain animals are reliant upon us (to a large degree) for their well-being does not give us a higher status over them. We are animals ourselves, after all—not better animals, just different animals who share the same, limited, fragile space with all of the other animals. However, only one animal is holding the reins.

SECTION III

SPEAKING FOR ANIMALS

REPRESENTING THE EXPERIMENTAL ANIMAL: COMPETING VOICES IN VICTORIAN CULTURE Jed Mayer Beginning in the 1870s, once-familiar animals began to take on strange new forms in English physiological laboratories. Dogs, cats, rabbits, and other domestic animals were transformed by the experiments of a new regimen of biological research modelled on Continental practices. Looking to the work of their fellows across the Channel, English physiologists drew from and innovated upon seminal texts like Claude Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), admired as much for its bold new method of inquiry as for its rhetorical exuberance. “By means of experimental analysis,” Bernard boasts, “I have even transformed warm-blooded animals, as it were, into coldblooded animals, so as to study better the characteristics of their histological units; I have succeeded in poisoning glands separately and in making them work, by means of dissected nerves, quite apart from the organism.”1 Such rhetoric divided popular opinion in England, repulsing the growing number of animal fanciers and welfare advocates even as it struck a responsive chord with those enraptured by the romance of exploring and conquering new realms of nature. Thus, an increasingly media-savvy scientific lobby quickly learned to temper and refine the enthusiasm of European scientific rhetoric. Just as Bernard and his disciples experimented with the nonhuman animal within the physiological laboratory, British advocates of vivisection sought to transform the popular image of such animals within the public sphere in answer to public criticism. Similarly, antivivisectionists experimented with new forms of representation which might further endow the nonhuman subject with the emotional and intellectual subjectivity often effaced by scientific theory and practice. In the heated vivisection debates of the last quarter of the nineteenth

1

Claude Bernard, Introduction à l’étude de la medicine éxpérimentale (Paris: J. B. Baillière et fils, 1865). References are to the facsimile reprint of the 1927 English translation, An introduction to the study of experimental medicine, trans. Henry Copley Green, introd. Lawrence J. Henderson (New York: Dover Publications, 1957), 90.

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century, the experimental animal refused to stay confined to the laboratory, as representations of the nonhuman proliferated in mainstream and specialist publications, in testimonies and speeches, as well as in the pamphlets, placards, and leaflets generated by antivivisectionists and their opponents.2 A markedly bifurcated and polarized image of the nonhuman animal would emerge from these debates, a creature at once driven by biological forces—mechanically engaged in a ruthless struggle for existence—yet simultaneously sapient, sensitive, and even articulate.3 At stake in these competing representations of the animal is the question of animal agency. The Physiology of Compassion For both the antivivisectionists and their opponents, the ability of humans to perceive and understand animal thoughts and emotions had a basis in shared physiological characteristics. While evolutionary theory would eventually provide a firmer basis for human-animal comparisons based on inherited similarities, shared characteristics could serve as a foundation for understanding even in the early years of animal welfare advocacy. At least since Jeremy Bentham, arguments for animal rights have centered on shared responses to suffering. In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780), Bentham laid down an early foundation for future discussions of the legal rights of animals: “The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?”4 Against skeptical attitudes towards the question of animal 2 Susan Hamilton has compiled a broadly representative selection of vivisectionrelated literature in her invaluable three volume anthology Animal Welfare and Antivivisection 1870–1910: Nineteenth Century Woman’s Mission (New York: Routledge, 2004). 3 Eileen Crist describes this bifurcation or “dissonance” as a split between the technical language of scientific discourse and the vernacular of naturalist writing. See Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999). Crist’s work is particularly valuable for charting the longer historical trajectory of this dissonance, from the language of Darwin through to late-twentiethcentury socio-biological discourses. In the following pages, I hope to provide a more detailed analysis of the shift from naturalist to technical language, emphasizing the important role played by the vivisection debates in mediating representations of the animal for cultural consumption. The “dissonant portrayals of animals” which Crist describes (3) became a matter of public scrutiny and debate in these years, mediated by the popular discourses of sentimentality and scientific progress. 4 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). Works, Vol. 1 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 143n.

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subjectivity, persisting from at least the time of Descartes’ mechanistic reduction of the animal to a bête machine, Bentham holds up the evidence of animal suffering as a minimum foundation for granting rights to animals. This physiological premise would be elaborated further in defenses of animals over the coming century. In a speech delivered to the House of Commons in support of an 1809 Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Bill, Thomas Erskine elaborated on Bentham’s principle: For every animal which comes in contact with Man, and whose powers, and qualities, and instincts, are obviously constructed for his use, Nature has taken the same care to provide, and as carefully and as bountifully as for Man himself, organs and feelings for its own enjoyment and happiness. Almost every sense bestowed upon Man is equally bestowed upon them—seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, the sense of pain and pleasure, and passions of love and anger, sensibility to kindness, and pangs from unkindness and neglect, are inseparable characteristics of their natures as much as of our own.5

In defending a bill drafted to protect animals from excessive pain, Erskine makes from the shared experience of suffering a rudimentary basis for understanding animal subjectivity. Indeed, the human sensibility to animal expressions of pain and pleasure provided animal welfare advocates with a means of imagining a “sensibility to kindness” in animals themselves. Similarly, Lewis Gompertz, one of the founders of the SPCA, would base his arguments for humanity’s moral obligations to animals on such a physiologically grounded understanding of animal mind. In his Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and Brutes (1824), Gompertz cites “the striking similitude in the structure and operations of the bodies of all animals, which may be collected from many able physiologists” as the basis for recognizing similarities in human and animal subjectivity: “Things which affect us, generally seem to affect them in the same way: and at least the following sensations and passions are common to both, viz. hunger, desire, emulation, love of liberty, playfulness, fear, shame, anger, and many other affections.”6 Not only the affections but also the very “love of liberty” which informs arguments for human rights is attributed to the animal

5

Qtd. in Rod Preece, Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb: A Chronicle of Sensibility to Animals (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002), 226. 6 Lewis Gompertz, Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and Brutes, ed. Charles Magel (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 23.

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on the basis of shared physiology, further extending the possibilities of representing animal agency. Although such physiological comparisons achieved additional persuasiveness with the emergence of evolutionary theory, the concomitant expansion of a dedicated physiological research program in Great Britain meant that such comparisons could, quite literally, cut both ways. If evolutionary kinship implied a reconsideration of our moral obligations to our nonhuman kin, it also could be used to argue for the utility of subjecting animals to vivisection for human benefit. As Cambridge’s first professor of physiology Michael Foster argued, “The truths which he [the physiologist] discovers in his laboratory pass over at once to the [medical] practitioner, busy in a constant struggle with the puzzling complexity of corporeal events: in his hands they are sifted, extended, and multiplied.”7 And yet in rendering such practical knowledge from the experimental animal, “The question of the animal being sensitive cannot alter the mode of investigation.”8 While moral arguments deriving from various models of kinship had certainly influenced animal rights advocacy decades before the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin’s theories inspired participants in the vivisection debates with a renewed sense of urgency that decisively altered the nature of animal representation. This urgency was in large part determined by the causal connection between the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man and the rise of experimental physiology on British shores. While a number of factors certainly contributed to what one nineteenth-century commentator described as “the renaissance period of English physiology,” the influence of Darwin can hardly be underestimated.9 In his account of the rise of experimental physiology at Cambridge under the direction of Michael Foster, Gerald Geison emphasizes the influence of Darwin’s theories on native physiological practices, claiming that “if English physiology did have a ‘national style,’ and if that style were to be captured in a single word, no better choice could be made than ‘evolutionary.’”10 As much as evolutionary kinship seemed

7

Michael Foster, “Vivisection.” Macmillan’s Magazine 29 (1874), 375. Samuel Wilks, “Vivisection: its pains and its uses—III,” The Nineteenth Century 10 (December, 1881), 947. 9 William Rutherford, “Opening Address to the Department of Anatomy and Physiology, BAAS, by the Department’s President,” Nature 9 (1873), 457. 10 Gerald Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology (Princeton University Press, 1978), 335. 8

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to authorize physiological comparisons between the human and the nonhuman by English researchers, the nature of that research could also be rendered as a violation of the moral responsibilities which this kinship would seem to entail. As noted by J. H. Bridges, “The methods specially characteristic of biological science may be summed up in one word: Comparison,” and this mode of comparison is further enhanced by evolutionary narratives: “We can select, from the abounding wealth of species round us, a series of intermediate terms, each differing from the preceding by exhibiting the structure to be examined in a less or in a greater degree of perfection.”11 Yet, as antivivisectionists would also emphasize, utilitarian attitudes towards animals could also be extended, through a similar “series of intermediate terms,” to other humans: A debased rule of behaviour towards the races of animals that have been brought into companionship with us, is an influence that will ramify far beyond the small circle of investigators, [carrying] in its train some increase of coarseness in our dealings with feebler human races, some callousness in all the subtler moral perceptions, some undoing of the finer webs of sympathy woven by the noblest through long lives of toil and sacrifice.12

The apparent contradiction between the theory and the practice of vivisection would quickly become a commonplace of antivivisection literature; indeed, polemicists on both sides of the debates interpreted evolutionary kinship in diverse ways, using Darwinian rhetoric to authorize their contested right to represent the nonhuman animal. If evolution provided a new foundation for knowing the animal, the vivisection debates also raised new and challenging questions regarding the ethical implications of that knowledge. Advocates of animal experimentation and their opponents based their competing representations on radically opposed models of animal agency, which nevertheless shared a common physiological and epistemological foundation.

11 John Henry Bridges, “Harvey and vivisection,” The Fortnightly Review 26 (July 1876), 6. 12 Bridges, 17.

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jed mayer The Politics of Animal Representation

Responses to animal suffering came increasingly to define moral and political identity in the nineteenth century.13 Representing the rights of animals could be regarded as a moral obligation comparable to human rights campaigns earlier in the century. The language of legal representation merged with the rich periodical culture of the period to produce a rhetoric in which journalism could serve as a voice for the voiceless, whether human or nonhuman. The first issue of the RSPCA journal, Animal World, stated its mission as extending the “mighty public voice” of journalism to “the next grade of nature’s scale.”14 Among the many publications representing special interests, including women, the working classes and “the coloured population,” the editor argues, there should also be one representing the interests of animals. “Animals who cannot talk surely require an advocate, as well as those who cannot express their grievances.” The legal model provided such journalism with a persuasive rhetorical authority. Successful legislation protecting the welfare of domestic animals had legitimized animal advocacy to such an extent that even the defenders of vivisection were obliged to define the role of animal research within the century’s growing culture of compassion.15 Defending his painful experiments on frogs as reported in the pages of Nature, George Henry Lewes went so far as to attribute the period’s increased sensitivity to animal suffering to the insights of physiologists: The advance of culture has brought with it an increased tenderness, and a more solicitous regard for the feelings of others, a regard extending slowly but surely to the feelings of animals also. It is to Science that this advance is mainly due. Only by gaining clear conceptions of natural sequences can men be brought to repress their native tendency to inflict pain as an

13 See Keith Thomas Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983). Despite the dates marked by its subtitle, much of Thomas’ evidence is drawn from nineteenth-century examples. A more detailed study of Victorian animal welfare advocacy is Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). See also James Turner, Reckoning With the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980). 14 “Our Object,” Animal World, October 1, 1869, 8. 15 For an overview of animal welfare legislation in this period, see Brian Harrison, “Animals and the State in Nineteenth-Century England,” in Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 82–122.

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exertion of power, or to feel ashamed of their thoughtless indifference when they see pain inflicted by others.16

Lewes goes on to enlist the evolutionary kinship of humans and nonhuman animals in support of the compassionating insights of comparative physiology when he asserts that the animal abuser “can only be made to feel that his act is vicious by having a vivid imagination of the fact that the animal organism is constructed like his own, and that the animal suffers as he suffers.” Physiological knowledge provides advocates of the new biology with a means of better understanding animal agency. Another defender of vivisection writing for Nature later argued that “so far from producing a hardening effect on the mind, these experiments seem to engender in the mind of the observer a love and a care for the brute creation, that does not exist in the mind of an ordinary person.”17 Physiological knowledge is translated into a knowing benevolence, with experimentation producing privileged access to the intimate experiences of fellow creatures. The uniquely evolutionary impulse of British physiology thus provided vivisection’s early defenders with the means of co-opting the sympathetic arguments of their opponents, as they positioned themselves in closer proximity to the inner life of animals. If evolution had provided British physiologists with a theoretical foundation for their research practices, it could also provide their opponents with additional scientific support for the narratives of kinship which animal welfare advocates had been elaborating for the better part of a century. The use of evolutionary theory in antivivisectionist literature was hardly uniform; yet, whatever their particular ideological differences, most antivivisectionists shared an acute awareness of the inherent contradiction between the moral implications of evolution and the physiological experiments it nevertheless authorized. Common responses to pain and suffering in humans and nonhuman animals entailed a more urgent sense of responsibility towards those who were most vulnerable. Recognition of human-animal kinship demanded a renewed scrutiny of human responsibilities towards the nonhuman, particularly in the realm of scientific inquiry. In “Vivisection as a Sign of the Times,” Lewis Carroll emphasized this contradiction by asking rhetorically: “‘Can the man who has once realised by minute study what

16 17

George Henry Lewes, “Vivisection,” Nature 9 (1873), 144–45. “Vivisection,” Nature 9 (1874), 178.

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the nerves are, what the brain is, and what waves of agony the one can convey to the other, go forth and wantonly inflict pain on any sentient being?’ . . . in the light of modern revelations we must sorrowfully confess ‘He can.’”18 Carroll points up here a crucial contradiction raised in physiological comparisons between humans and animals: increased understanding of animal sensibilities through vivisection simultaneously violated human sensitivity to animal suffering. As a direct response to parallel claims made by vivisection advocates, arguments like Carroll’s show the extent to which scientific and humanitarian discourses interacted in these years of controversy, with antivivisection rhetoric continuing to draw from physiological precedent even as it used the understanding of animal agency enabled by such knowledge towards very different ends. Representing Laboratory Life: Animal Presences and Absences Although antivivisectionists and their opponents often used similar foundations for representing animals, the form which these representations took reveal the deep fault lines running between British animal advocacy and scientific discourse. Although the literature of vivisection advocacy frequently spoke of the physiologist’s privileged understanding of the animal, it rarely discussed the actual animals used in experimentation. Through its life signs, recorded by the growing array of technical devices to which it was attached, the laboratory animal was made to “speak” for the benefit of scientific knowledge.19 And yet the sights and sounds of the laboratory, and of the individual animals sacrificed to scientific knowledge, were effectively silenced in the technical literature of experimental physiology. The first physiological textbook published in England, the Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory (1873) edited by John Burdon Sanderson, was notable both for its lack of provision for animal suffering, a point which was closely scrutinized during the Royal Commission investigation into the practice of vivisection, and for the less notorious but no less significant absence of the experimental 18 Lewis Carroll, “Vivisection as a Sign of the Times,” Pall Mall Gazette, February 12, 1875, 4. 19 See Robert Frank, “The Telltale Heart: Physiological Instruments, Graphic Methods, and Clinical Hopes, 1854–1914,” in The Investigative Enterprise: Experimental Physiology in Nineteenth-Century Medicine, ed. William Coleman and Frederic L. Holmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 211–90.

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animal within its text and accompanying diagrams.20 Restoring the laboratory animal to the public gaze became a crucial point for the antivivisectionists, and in this restoration emerges an alternative means of knowing the animal based on common feeling as well as common physiology. George Hoggan, himself an aspiring physician trained under Claude Bernard, set an early precedent for this kind of restorative representation. Hoggan’s highly publicized 1875 letter to the Morning Post would be further reprinted and augmented in mainstream and activist publications, and its effective juxtaposition of compassion and callousness dramatized the alternative ways of knowing the animal that were at the heart of the vivisection debates. Alluding to the unobserved acts of cruelty allowed to proliferate under laboratory conditions, Hoggan argues that, “although hundreds of such abuses are being constantly perpetrated among us, the public knows no more about them than what the distant echo reflected from some handbook for the laboratory affords.” The presence of the animal is indeed a “distant echo” within the pages of these technical manuals, the experimental subject having been effaced by an English scientific community apparently sensitive to the volatile nature of representing the experimental animal. The figure of the echo would prove especially resonant in antivivisectionist rhetoric, and would come to serve as an implicit metaphor for the relationship between animal agency and human perception. The heart of Hoggan’s letter is his account of physiological experiments on dogs, based on scenes he himself witnessed under Bernard’s tutelage. Transgressing professional and generic decorum, Hoggan represents the animal test subject in the well-honed language of Victorian sentimentality, restoring the emotional and cognitive presence of the 20 Paul H. White has called attention of this aspect of English texts on experimental physiology: “Unlike their French and German counterparts, English textbooks in physiology virtually never portrayed whole animals undergoing experimentation. The lavish volume of plates that accompanied Burdon-Sanderson’s work, for example, showed only various recording instruments, graphic displays, individual organs, and microscopic sections.” See “The Experimental Animal in Victorian Britain,” in Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, ed. Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 70. English antivivisectionists were thus compelled to look to these European texts when seeking material which might restore the animal to representations of the physiological laboratory. The controversial nature of this enterprise will be discussed at greater length later in this essay. For further discussion of this tactic, see Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Lucy Bending, The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Culture. (New York: Oxford UP, 2000); and French, 267–70.

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animal to a clinical environment designed to efface affect and agency. His account of the “saddest sight I ever witnessed” makes its sympathetic appeal by dramatizing the seemingly unbridgeable emotional distance between the human operators and the nonhuman subject. After the dogs have been brought up from their “cellar to the laboratory for sacrifice,” they make “friendly advances to each of the three or four persons present, and, as far as eyes, ears, and tail could make a mute appeal for mercy eloquent, they tried it in vain.”21 The “mute appeal” which fails to speak to their human operators is amplified for a sympathetic readership via the language of sentiment. As the dogs are “thrown on the torture trough a low complaining whine at such treatment would be all the protest made, and they would continue to lick the hand which bound them.”22 The almost unbearable intimacy of this moment nearly obscures the fact that Hoggan’s description is a composite of several operations he witnessed as a medical student. Just as the physiological handbook effaces the individual animal in espousing general biological principles and practices, so Hoggan’s account subsumes the diverse experiences of a number of animals into a single mute appeal to the sympathies of a host of individual readers. Just as the affectless and faceless “three or four persons present” figure as a synecdoche for the profession of scientific medicine generally, so the dogs serve to represent the numberless animals whose appeals go unheard. A similar tension between the animal as individual subject and as symbolic representative runs throughout the literature of animal advocacy. As leading antivivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe remarked in one of her popular journalistic pieces, “Dogs Whom I Have Met”: “There are few things more irritating to one who consistently honours dogs than to hear superficial and indiscriminate people talk of those animals as if they were all alike in their mental and moral qualities, and only differed from each other by being white or black, rough-haired or silky-coated. ‘The dog,’ these persons will complacently observe, ‘is’ this, that, or the other.”23 Yet in a similar essay, “The Consciousness of Dogs,” published the same year, Cobbe asks: “Whose heart does not grow sick at the reflection that this sacred trust of the dog in man, should be so often betrayed,—that dull boors should lure him by mock

21 22 23

Hoggan, 521. Hoggan, 521–22. Frances Power Cobbe, “Dogs Whom I Have Met,” Cornhill 26 (1872), 662.

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words of encouragement to the death (to him so slow and agonizing) of the halter; and that far worse wretches, in the guise of cultivated gentlemen, should first fondle, and then dissect him alive, while even in death he strives to show his confidence, and to lick their hands?”24 While the “cultivated gentlemen” and their callous hands remain plural, “the dog” is at once singular and singularly representative of all dogs. As in Hoggan’s piece published several years later, the pathetic appeal of hand-licking is rendered as a single, unique, and intimate action, which is nevertheless quietly representative of other pathetic scenes in physiological laboratories. The challenge of this form of animal representation is to transcribe the mute appeals of individual animals while at the same time making associative connections to unnumbered fellow-creatures, without at the same time effacing the animal in the manner of scientific discourse. The tension between the individual agency and the representative nature of animal suffering in antivivisectionist representations of the animal is in sharp contrast to the relative absence of actual animals in physiological literature. This in part derives from the objective imperative so crucial to efficient laboratory regimen. Translating this classic principle of rational scientific inquiry to the demands of modern physiological research, Bernard describes the new man of science, “absorbed by the scientific idea which he pursues: he no longer hears the cry of animals, he no longer sees the blood that flows, he sees only his idea and perceives only organisms concealing problems which he intends to solve” (103). Bernard’s followers across the Channel would build upon this precept, infusing the science of physiology with a romantic vision of nature in which the cries of animals fade into the general ambience. In a pamphlet published by the vivisection advocacy group, the Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research (AAMR), John Cleland provides a classic instance of the romance of English physiology: with open and earnest eye to wait upon nature, and learn from her what her doings are, how her operations are conducted, what those processes are, the sum of which we refer to under the name of life, and how they are modified by each change of circumstance:—to do this is to subject your whole habits of thought to such a discipline as cannot fail to have

24 Frances Power Cobbe, “The Consciousness of Dogs.” Quarterly Review 133 (1872), 429.

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With the controversial research practice’s reinvention as an “open and earnest” attendance upon the ever-changing and evolving forces of life, the experimental animal is effectively transformed from a sensitive living creature into an aggregate of natural processes. Advocates for the new biology represented the animal less as a subject than as a being subject to natural forces, effectively overriding the models of animal agency promoted by their critics. By reconstructing the sentient animal as an element of “nature,” such rhetoric implicitly connects physiology with the less controversial fields of popular natural history. In his defense of vivisection composed for The Nineteenth Century, high-profile surgeon Samuel Wilks draws a more direct connection between experimental physiology and less controversial disciplines like geology and biology: Whether it be a question of the nature of the rocks beneath us, or the composition of the ocean, or of vegetable life or of animal life, the method of inquiry is the same. The rocks are broken and put in the crucible, the water is submitted to analysis, the plant is dissected, and, in order to ascertain the laws which govern its growth and propagation, experiments are made by grafting and by cross fertilization. In animal life the same method must be adopted to unlock the secrets of nature.26

The animal becomes a kind of cabinet or geode to be unlocked, a repository of elements which must be “broken” like any other substance in order to yield up nature’s secrets. If Bernard’s regimen of closing the mind and the senses to the cries of the experimental animal was an effective form of self-discipline in the laboratory, the rhetorical extension of this practice into the public sphere helped to legitimize experimental physiology in Great Britain. Paradoxically, the actual subject of such research, the experimental animal, became effectively invisible in scientific accounts, romanticized into natural forces virtually indistinguishable from those of earth, air, and water. Unlike antivivisectionist literature, with its tension between representations of the individual and the universal animal, the literature of physiology universalizes the animal out of existence.

25

John Cleland, Experiment on Brute Animals (London: J. W. Kolckmann, 1883),

3–4. 26

Wilks, 947.

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The Science of Sentiment In seeking to restore the animal’s physical, cognitive, and emotional presence to the laboratory from which it was rhetorically effaced, antivivisectionist literature produced a hybrid representation of the animal composed of physiological descriptions and sentimental narratives. The absent animal in technical accounts could be restored by the surrounding texts in such publications. Animal advocates facilitated the reader’s emotional connection with laboratory animals, most simply by making their stories known, but also by drawing upon popular narratives of human-animal kinship. At least since Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories (1786), animal advocacy in English letters had taken the form of didactic narratives, often written from the animal’s point of view. In her study of talking animals in children’s literature, Tess Cosslett has noted that the role of advocacy could be addressed quite literally in such writing, as when one of Trimmer’s human characters says to another: “‘As there are no courts in which beasts can seek redress, I set up one for them in my own breast, where humanity pleads their cause,’ says farmer Wilson, and Mrs Benson replies, ‘I wish they had such an advocate in every breast.’”27 As animal welfare advocacy evolved over the next century, narrative elements employed in these didactic tales for children became popular material for adult readers. Mary Sanders Pollock has noted the apparent generic contradiction in this development, since “the conventions of literary realism” would seem to “exclude the representation of nonhuman subjectivity, and hence, the exploration of a biotic and social community which includes nonhuman animal subjects.”28 But of course this is precisely what antivivisectionists sought to contest, both in their adoption of evolutionary models of kinship and in their narratives of animal subjectivity.

27 Quoted in Tess Cosslett Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction 1786–1914 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 81. Cosslett observes the paradox implicit in the courtroom metaphor.” Are these writers then advocates, speaking for their clients? But in the courtroom it is the accused who has an advocate. The animal autobiographer is instead the victim and accuser.” The ambiguities and conflicts in advocacy and representation of animals in the vivisection debates might be seen as dramatizing the various dimensions of this inherent contradiction. 28 Mary Sanders Pollock, “Ouida’s Rhetoric of Empathy: A Case Study in Victorian Anti-Vivisection Narrative,” in Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture, ed. Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 137.

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Popular animal autobiographies from the later-nineteenth century, like Ouida’s Puck (1870), Gordon Stables’ Sable and White (1894), and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), provided extended testimony of animal subjectivity by telling their stories from the animal’s point of view. Written for adults, such tales achieved moral authority from their denunciation of human cruelty, and derived intellectual authority from popular notions of evolutionary kinship. Stables’ narrative contains a dog’s description of a vivisection laboratory, and the narrator of Ouida’s novel is infused with the rich sense of animal agency she would develop later in her numerous antivivisectionist publications. But even a popular and influential work like Sewell’s novel, addressing animal welfare issues which would seem unrelated to the ethics of scientific inquiry, may be seen to participate in contemporary narratives of biological and emotional kinship. Many key speeches in Black Beauty derive their pathos from the physiological similarities between humans and nonhuman animals that were read to such different effect in the vivisection debates: “Those who have never had a bit in their mouths,” Black Beauty tells his human readers, “cannot think how bad it feels; a great piece of cold hard steel as thick as a man’s finger to be pushed into one’s mouth, between one’s teeth and over one’s tongue, with the ends coming out at the corner of your mouth, and held fast there by straps over your head, under your throat, round your nose, and under your chin; so that no way in the world can you get rid of the nasty hard thing.”29 The human reader’s identification with the nonhuman animal’s suffering is based on an awareness of kindred physiological traits that owes much to the Darwinian revolution. Interspecies kinship is expressed between other nonhuman animals as well, as the horse Merrylegs denounces the practice of “cropping” the tails and ears of horses and dogs. Regarding with pity the sight of a new litter of Skye terriers after having their ears cropped, Merrylegs notes: “They healed in time, and they forgot the pain, but the nice soft flap that of course was intended to protect the delicate part of the ears from dust and injury was gone for ever. Why don’t they cut their own children’s ears into points to make them look sharp?”30 The unique anatomical function of the dog’s ears is sacrificed to human fashion, a polemical point

29 Anna Sewell, Black Beauty: his grooms and companions; the autobiography of a horse (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1877), 18. 30 Sewell, 38.

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that is intensified by turning the physiological tables on the practice, imagining human children in the place of the dogs. Though such physiological connections are crucial in making the sympathetic appeal of these stories, more significant is the implicit premise that humans and animals can understand one another, a premise that could be sanctioned for the literary realism of adult literature by popular notions of evolutionary kinship. The ability to know and understand the nonhuman animal was a point frequently stressed by the sentimental narratives incorporated into antivivisectionist literature. One of the more enduring stories of animal companionship to appear in antivivisectionist literature was the ongoing story of “My Jack” by the Reverend Thomas Hugo. The story of the narrator and his dog’s first meeting participates in the developing literature of animal sentimentality, and emphasizes the possibility of communication across the species barrier. Encountering a stray dog, the narrator takes the measure of his animal gaze: “It was a look of such humble, pathetic, patient, imploring, loving entreaty, that, if I had not been at the moment in a mood more than usually unimpressible, I could not have regarded it without emotion. The poor beast told me, as plainly as a dog can tell,—and that is as plainly, madam, as you or I—that he was homeless.”31 Predictably, the dog’s appeal melts the narrator’s unimpressible mood, and he comes to adopt the forlorn creature, but not before being humbled by this “lower order” of animal. After losing the dog by taking a detour, the narrator walked “joyously onward, and reveled in the proud satisfaction of feeling how finely a man can overreach a brute!” But when he hears the dog’s footsteps behind him again, he realizes that his pursuer “had never been fooled by the superior wisdom which I fancied myself to possess.”32 This narrative of dethronement from the head of the natural order achieves an additional resonance from its implicit association with contemporaneous evolutionary narratives, which might also seem to sanction the possibility of trans-species communication. Similar anecdotes of animal sagacity and communication are narrated by Darwin in his best-selling Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). The voice of the animal, conveyed in looks and sounds, enters into the mind of the narrator, until he can no longer ignore the dog’s mute appeal for aid: “The very

31 32

Thomas Hugo, “My Jack,” The Home Chronicler, September 8, 1877, 1013. Hugo, 1013.

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echo of those steps, the pat of those little weary feet, was again in my ear, and the sound was now full of upbraiding, full of condemnation of my heartless wrong.”33 As in Hoggan’s letter, the figure of the echo comes to stand for the presence of animal voices in human discourses. Here the smooth stream of human consciousness is disturbed by the expression of animal emotion, which takes up residence in his mind, and is elided with the narrator’s own voice of self-condemnation. Stories like this played an important role in antivivisectionist literature. The steady campaign of exposing the public to the horrors of vivisection via reproductions and quotations from physiological handbooks and other specialist texts was certainly effective as a means of shining “light in dark places.”34 Yet the tension between sentiment and surgery could prove as disturbing as it was enlightening to more sensitive readers. The Home Chronicler set a precedent in antivivisectionist publications for exposing the public to detailed accounts of animal experiments. Noting that details of these practices have been previously “hidden from the general eye in purely technical works, read perhaps by only a small section of a small professional class,” the Home Chronicler vows to bring this elusive information to light, in effect transgressing the boundaries of genre and discipline by inserting specialized scientific discourse into sentimental journalism.35 In its new context the dry, unemotional language of laboratory practice was juxtaposed with the language of pathos and pity, as science was weighed against sentiment and found predictably wanting. Yet one of the more successful antivivisectionist journals, the Victoria Street Society’s Zoophilist, recognized that such extreme tactics risked alienating readers, and so promised to temper its accounts of laboratory life with lighter material: “It is now time,” the editors have agreed, “to consult the wishes of the great majority of

33

Hugo, 1014. This was the title of a notorious pamphlet authored by Frances Power Cobbe and published by the Victoria Street Society. The first edition of the pamphlet is reproduced in Hamilton, 291–322. Later editions included an appendix entitled “Light in English Dark Places” by Benjamin Bryan (London: Victoria Street Society, 1888). This appendix served to counter objections made to the antivivisectionist practice of reproducing illustrations and descriptions of physiological experiments from European texts. The source material for this appendix was largely drawn from a Cambridge “Scientific Instrument Company, the object of which is to manufacture and sell the needful appliances for the vivisector’s laboratory. The fact of a supply have been created implies a demand, and we have before us several copies of the price list of the company in question, the latest dated August, 1888” (1–2). 35 The Home Chronicler, June 24, 1876, 1. 34

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their subscribers, and to provide for them a smaller quantity of purely scientific matter, and a larger one of matters political, social, and moral, having reference to the Anti-Vivisection crusade. It is also intended that tales of the charming story ‘Jack’ shall appear from time to time in a feuilleton sheet.”36 While it might be argued that the inclusion of more sentimental narratives into the publication served merely to dilute or sweeten the harsher material, such narratives may be seen as serving a more significant function. As in the ongoing “Jack” narrative, these stories promoted a particular way of regarding the nonhuman animal in stark contrast to that of the laboratory narratives which appeared alongside them. If the animal voice could figure as a moral and didactic element in such narratives, the very presence of such texts within antivivisectionist publications was itself a means of incorporating animal testimonies within human discourses. Such narratives represent the alternative form of knowledge gained through lives shared with animals, countering knowledge of animals gained from experiments with the knowledge of experience. Though both forms of knowledge came increasingly to rest on the notion of human-animal kinship, the stories which such knowledge sanctioned could not have been more different, despite their common physiological pedigree. The Unitary Voice of Scientific Authority Advocates of the new biology played a significant role in monitoring the embattled borders of scientific discourse, and the appropriation and incorporation of physiological representations of the animal into antivivisection publications was singled out as an especially egregious transgression. Samuel Wilks refers with disgust to a “penny illustrated paper,” presumably the Home Chronicler, “which panders to the vilest and lowest feelings of the mob by delineating in detail all the circumstances of brutal crimes,”37 and another vivisection advocate equated such tactics with the writers of “Penny Dreadfuls,” in contrast to his own professional and literary restraint: “I do not write for readers who take a pleasure in ghastly descriptions and ugly minutiae, which are

36 37

The Zoophilist, December 1, 1882, 197. Wilks, 944.

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totally unnecessary for the discussion of principles.”38 The author of this work, a monograph published by the Physiological Society entitled Physiological Cruelty; or, Fact vs. Fancy, demonstrates his professional tact and regard for public feelings by relegating any impolite subject matter to an appendix, thus effectively shifting the experimental animal further to the sideline of his discussion. The author (anonymously writing under the pseudonym “Philanthropos”) places further strictures against animal representation when he warns that in matters of scientific progress, a “lay man or woman must not be swayed by the natural love of animals, and dislike to the infliction of pain, which make it grievous to think that any feeling creature has been hurt deliberately; still less must they excite their feelings by the attempt to realize the necessarily repugnant details of the operations, and to imagine their own pet dogs subjected to them.”39 Encouraging such sympathetic imaginings was, of course, a popular tactic of antivivisection literature, as seen in articles like “To Those Who Keep Pets,” by Florence Henniker.40 More generally, however, to excite feelings of sympathy for animals was the rhetorical mainstay of animal advocacy for over a century, and with its exclusion from the scientific sphere a crucial dimension of animal subjectivity was excluded as well. Thus, scientific decorum effectively disqualified two major rhetorical means of representing the experimental animal in antivivisectionist literature: the sentimental and the graphic. As the Zoophilist’s concession to readerly sensitivities showed, however, these two elements were often in conflict within antivivisection publications themselves. A later publication intended for family reading and devoted to a wide range of animal welfare issues, The Animals’ Friend, offended readers with its frank reportage of animal cruelty. The editor’s reply reveals the difficulty of maintaining a diversity of perspectives in animal advocacy: “Some of our friends want us to content ourselves with mere assertions and generalizations, and to leave the horrid proofs out; but the world is sceptical, and people demand facts and proofs, and, between the two, our sympathetic friends and the unsympathetic public, we are on the 38 Physiological Cruelty; or, Fact vs. Fancy. An Inquiry into the Vivisection Question (London: Tinsley Bros., 1883), 2. The emphasis in both cases on the cheap cost of such publications is clearly directed towards the “low” tastes to which such publications are alleged to pander, thus equating more sordid representations of animal cruelty with the antivivisectionists’ efforts to combat it. 39 “Philanthropos,” 2. 40 The Animals’ Friend, August 1, 1894, 1–2.

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horns of a dilemma.”41 As the burden of proof for charges of alleged cruelty in animal experimentation lay upon vivisection’s critics, they often bore the brunt of public disgust in representing the experimental animal veiled by scientific discourse. Despite the risks involved, however, antivivisectionist publications continued printing accounts of physiological research along with sentimental representations of animals. Such bifurcated representations made visible the various constructions which could be placed upon the animal in late-Victorian culture. Charges of sordidness and sentimentality by the scientific community challenged the veracity of antivivisectionist claims, and ruled their version of animal agency out of court. To represent the animal with feelings was to confuse public discussion of the utility of vivisection. Looking past the cries of the experimental animal to the information to be obtained from it helped to maintain a strict laboratory regimen. Similarly, by rhetorically transforming the animal research subject into abstract images of volatile natural forces holding life-saving information, vivisection advocates assumed public ownership of a rational, unsentimental picture of the nonhuman, while effectively excluding the animal from public representation. Animal voices were often elided with the voices of their advocates, as the scientific lobby differentiated its own position from its allegedly irrational opponents. The author of Physiological Cruelty draws an equation between the public discord over the issue of vivisection and the emotional discord of animal sympathizers: When a question has been made the subject of hot debate, and been tossed up and down in discussions where feeling has played as large a part as argument, it becomes enveloped in a dust-cloud of words, sweeping charges, and irrelevant recriminations, in which it is difficult to keep sight of the central object. The first duty, then, of any one who wishes to see the truth for himself, and to show it to others, is to get rid, as far as may be, of all this turmoil.42

Publications like this and the series of pamphlets published by the AAMR presented themselves as dissipating the atmosphere of mutual recrimination, despite the fact that they participated in and effectively perpetuated the war of words surrounding vivisection. Consolidating the rhetoric of scientific progress, the defenders of experimental physiology

41 42

The Animals’ Friend, December 1, 1894, 81. “Philanthropos,” 1.

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crafted a unified voice in opposition to the “dust-cloud of words” generated by their opponents. The contrast between their representational practices is comparable to the discursive tensions between heteroglossic and unitary language described by Mikhail Bakhtin. In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin describes how the consolidation of diverse voices into a unified or “unitary language” may create a discursive practice which “gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization.”43 The increasingly unitary language of vivisection advocacy served to unify and strengthen resistance to widespread antivivisection sentiments, successfully deflecting further legislation restricting animal experimentation in the nineteenth century, and turning popular opinion increasingly against their opposition. This was largely achieved through the refinement of a discourse for representing the new biology which excluded the heteroglossic voices, not only of animal advocates, but of animals themselves. Animal Voices in the Public Sphere The increasingly unitary language of the new biology is one in which the animal voice is conspicuously absent. By keeping the animal presence, in all its many rhetorical forms, before the public attention, antivivisectionists effectively challenged this unitary language. As Mary Sanders Pollock has observed in regards to the animal autobiographies and antivivisection polemic of the late-Victorian woman of letters, Ouida, taking up the voice of the animal could provide an effective means of attacking “the monologic discourse of those who would silence the cries of the vulnerable.”44 Speaking more broadly of the ways in which animal advocacy can transform cultural and biological environments,

43 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 271. 44 Pollock’s essay presents a remarkably generative application of Bakhtin to humananimal discourses of the late-nineteenth century. Treating animal speech in Ouida’s animal autobiographies as Bakhtinian “hybrid discourses,” she posits the incorporation of animal voices in human discourses. I wish to take this notion somewhat more literally in the following pages, by exploring the ways in which the actual sounds uttered by animals under the knife served as the foundation for antivivisectionist representations of the animal, and that these sounds continue to echo in the discourses generated on both sides of the vivisection debate, altering and reconfiguring the very nature of that

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Barbara T. Gates argues: “Animal preservation implies an ecosystem in which animals with language—human beings—speak on behalf of other species.”45 But of course the place of language within such an imagined ecosystem is never a stable one, and in the vivisection debates rivalry over the right to speak for other species made the preservation of the experimental animal seem as much a threat to social stability as of species protection. As Anna Kingsford represented the opposed positions: “[W]hen the vivisectors ask us angrily, ‘What right have you to meddle with the researches of scientific men?’ . . . we turn upon them with greater anger and retort in our turn, ‘What right have you to render earth uninhabitable and life insupportable for men with hearts in their bosoms?’”46 Such language does indeed suggest an ecosystem as well as a social system in turmoil, and indirectly participates in the physiologists’ transformation of the experimental animal into a synecdoche for the natural world. But the presence of research animals could be felt in ways that were more than rhetorical or symbolic. In physiological comparisons, animal suffering could be interpreted as signifying a range of physical, emotional, and emotional experience common to both humans and animals. The language of animal advocacy set itself the task of interpreting and mediating this testimony to sympathetic readers, but when the cries of animals in laboratories was overheard, it provided evidence of animal agency unmediated by sentimental or scientific rhetoric, however much the interpretation of this evidence was shaped by popular discourses. The overheard cries of laboratory animals became the source of several highly publicized occasions of public outrage, demonstrating the degree to which animal suffering could render certain environments “uninhabitable.” One of these incidents represents the first English agitation over vivisection, which in fact took place in Florence in the latter months of 1863. Concern over the sounds emanating from the home of Prof. Moritz Schiff caught the ears of one Anglo-Irish expatriate, Frances Power Cobbe, who promptly collected a petition of some 700

debate, and thus participating in what might otherwise be regarded as exclusively human discourses. 45 Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 124. Though Gates’ argument is directed primarily towards the preservation of endangered species in the wild, it might nevertheless be regarded as generally applicable to those social and ecological systems in which humans take up a verbal defense of animals. 46 Kingsford, 305.

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signatures, attached to a memorial urging the professor “use moderation” in his physiological researches. With the aid of the local scientific community, Schiff refuted the charges of this early antivivisectionist agitation, but not without being exposed to considerable public scorn, which eventually led to his relocation to Geneva in 1877.47 The nature of the sounds heard, and their right interpretation, continued to be a source of contestation well into the English vivisection debates, showing the degree to which animal testimonies could be sustained in otherwise human discourses. An 1876 review of Schiff ’s writings for a British audience aggressively dismisses the antivivisectionists’ interpretation of animal cries, based on a misunderstanding of “physiological phenomena” in response to artificial stimulus.48 Since, according to the reviewer, “the lower is the animal in the scale of organic nature the longer do its automatic movements continue,” and since “the apparent writhings and contortions of the muscular fibres are, in such cases, wholly independent of pain,” those who were disturbed by the cries of animals heard in Schiff ’s neighborhood were mistaken in associating such sounds with suffering. Thus, even in those cases where animal testimonies were heard, the very nature of such testimony could be contested in terms closely resembling those which attended debates over representations of animal agency. Similarly, in a highly publicized case in Paris concerning the owner and occupants of a lodging house situated near the Sorbonne, the litigation centered on competing interpretations of animal testimony. The lodging house owner, Mme Gélyot, enlisted the aid of the local constabulary, who collected evidence for her case. One constable had “even taken the trouble to distinguish between the various types of howls that he heard when he went to the rue de la Sorbonne.”49 Of the various cries, the most disturbing was that which “wailed in tones that resembled a human voice”: as in the English vivisection debates, kinship between the human and the nonhuman was central to questions of the animal’s moral status.50 Enlisting the aid of the Sorbonne’s powerful

47 See Patrizia Guarnieri, “Moritz Schiff (1823–96): Experimental Physiology and Noble Sentiment in Florence,” in Vivisection in Historical Perspective, ed. Nicolaas A. Rupke (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 105–24. 48 “Schiff on Vivisection,” British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review 57 (1876), 135. 49 Quoted in Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in NineteenthCentury Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 20–21. 50 In The Descent of Man, Darwin described the human influence through domestication as having resulted in dogs communicating in at least “four or five distinct tones.

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scientific lobby, physiologist M. Paul Bert refuted the charges made against him, but this ruling was later overturned on an appeal. In the Zoophilist’s detailed report on this appeal, Gélyot’s legal counsel is quoted as apologizing for having to bring the “excesses” of vivisection, excusing this tactic as affording “the surest way of deciding the Court to save our eyes from the spectacle and our ears from the echo, of these tortures.”51 The hazards of using animal testimony in this legal context serve as a striking illustration of varied responses to animal voices in antivivisection literature. Making a shared human-animal environment tolerable to those sensitive to the sounds of animal suffering requires the reproduction of these sounds as testimony. Yet the power of such testimony to disturb indicates the degree to which the voices of individual animals can continue to echo in human representations, even when such representations become highly contested. As if in answer to the barriers erected by the scientific lobby against the testimonies of animal advocates and their clients, Gélyot’s counsel concludes his statement by arguing: “It is not, I know, the business of the Court to echo, by its decree, the precise and clear terms of this protestation, but it is possible to oppose the barrier of a hitherto unrecognized right to the noisy and supercilious claims of interests which are less scientific than professional.”52 Such cases demonstrate important connections between human and nonhuman animals, communicating across professional and national barriers, with expressions of animal agency passing from laboratory to public, from courtroom to publication. Despite charges of sentimentalism and sensationalist distortion, it might be argued that the testimonies of real animals continued to echo in antivivisectionist representations of the animal, and continue to resonate into the present century.

Although barking is a new art,” Darwin argues, “no doubt the parent-species of the dog expressed their feelings by cries of various kinds. With the domesticated dog we have the bark of eagerness, as in the chase; that of anger, as well as growling; the yelp or howl of despair, as when starting on a walk with his master; and the very distinct one of demand or supplication, as when wishing for a door or window to be opened.” See Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (Hammondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2004), 106–07. This is suggestive as an evolutionary consideration of the communicative interaction between species, complementary to the sentimental narratives discussed throughout this essay. In the Darwinian model, human-animal discourses might be seen as mutually influential, with domestication altering animal “speech,” and with the cries of animals influencing human strategies of representation. 51 “Gélyot v. The State,” The Zoophilist, May 1, 1882, 27. 52 “Gélyot v. The State,” 28.

FORMS OF LIFE: THE SEARCH FOR THE SIMIAN SELF IN APE LANGUAGE EXPERIMENTS Rebecca Bishop Perhaps in many moments of my life the other is for me reduced to [a spectacle] . . . But should the voice alter, should the unwonted appear in the score of the dialogue, or, on the contrary, should it respond too well to what I thought . . . suddenly there breaks forth evidence that yonder also, minute by minute, life is being lived: somewhere behind those eyes, behind those gestures . . . another private world shows through.1

In October 1978, the cover of National Geographic featured a head and shoulders photograph of a female gorilla. However this is not the caught-in-the-wild shot of an ape object, curiously exotic yet sentimentally similar. What is particularly striking about the image is that it was taken by the gorilla herself. The animal has pointed her camera at a plexiglass mirror, so that it appears that the gorilla’s camera points directly at its audience. Certainly, the novelty value of a gorilla using a camera and a mirror reflects a century-long fascination with apes mimicking humans, yet this single image traverses further layers of meaning that have entered contemporary discourses on animal minds and bodies. Immediately striking is the implied reversal of (human/ civilized) subject as gazer and the passive (animal, primitive) object of spectatorship. The gorilla’s lens points directly at the reader, symbolically rendering the reader the object of the animal’s photographic gaze. This signifying act endows the animal with agency—a reversal that affirms the gorilla knows herself, even as it remains the captured object of primate vision. It is this dynamic between an animal objecthood and sentient subjectivity, between being animal and becoming human-like that lies at the heart of both historic and contemporary discourses on ape agency. “Agency” is itself perhaps a murky term, evoking at once a capacity for individual action and a subjective personhood—a self that exists prior to social articulation and one that emerges within the exchanges

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 10–11.

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of intersubjective experience. In the context of animal agency, these notions are further embedded in what might be seen as a politics and poetics of becoming; the nonhuman primate it seems, has always existed on the threshold of selfhood. Tracing a history of representations of the ape agent, it appears that discourses on animal agency consistently link the capacity for agentive communication with a training and pedagogy in the civilized manners of the ‘fully human’. In capturing herself on camera, Koko at once signifies to her audience the presence of a self within and the capacity to represent that self via the communication technologies of the contemporary world. The article that accompanied the image of this simian photographer created furor in scientific circles for its bold claims of gorilla language use, creativity and emotionality. In the article, Francine Patterson, the doctoral student teaching American Sign Language to Koko, claimed that the gorilla used her sign language abilities to tell jokes, to use insults and swear-words (signing, for example, “rotten-stink” and “dirty-toilet”), express feelings of guilt (“Sorry bite scratch”), to lie, to talk to herself in sign language, to engage in imaginative play, to show empathy for humans and animals, and to understand the concept of past and future events (“later Koko drink”). At the outset of the article, Patterson explains that “Koko has made us, her human companions, aware not only that her breed is bright, but also that it shares sensitivities commonly held to be the prerogative of people.” “What makes this awesome”, she writes, “is that Koko, by all accepted concepts of human and animal nature, should not be able to do any of this. Traditionally such behaviour has been considered uniquely human; yet here is a language using gorilla.”2 In her ongoing project, Patterson has maintained that she has no doubt that Koko has a “strong sense of self” evidenced, she suggests, in Koko’s “reference to her own internal and emotional states, attribution of mental states to others, self-conscious behaviours, value judgments, self-talk, humor, expressions of intentionality, deception and embarrassment.” “Emotional states are internal, private conditions,” she writes, “[a]nimals cannot reflect on such states unless they are capable of

2 Francine Patterson, “Conversations with a Gorilla”, National Geographic 154, no. 4 (1978): 438, 440.

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reflecting on themselves, that is, unless they are self-aware.”3 Patterson notes that Koko’s ‘self ’ is also revealed in her engagement in “games, teasing, showing off, creating, grief, gratitude, grudging, sympathy, empathy, reconciliation, sorrow, saving face, denial, argument, definition, representational art and dance and concern about one’s image.”4 Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (1997), an ape language researcher working with bonobos, also sees a quality of self in her simian subjects. Writing of the bonobo Kanzi, she states, “[h]e understands my moods, my thoughts, my feelings and emotions . . . [h]e can read my facial expressions as well as, if not better than, any human being I have ever known.”5 The researcher’s attribution of subjecthood and agency to the language-using ape highlights the way in which nonhuman entities can be endowed with meanings which transcend traditional Western subjectobject relations, where animals become part of a currency in which the boundaries between self and other are articulated. At the same time, these accounts of nonhuman primates seem to posit a unitary individual self in possession of agency, an agency that clearly mirrors the Western liberal humanist subject fashioned in Renaissance epistemology and invigorated in Cartesian discourse: a self in possession of both soul and reason, a subject able to communicate its inner states, a self that knows itself.6 This is an agency found not simply in the capacity to act but to re-act, to acknowledge what Schultz (1967) has referred to as the “existence of a Thou”, the experience of the other as part of the intersubjective matrix of communication. In ape language research we find a complex torsion between ontology and epistemology which

3 Francine Patterson and Ronald Cohn, “Self-Recognition in Lowland Gorillas” in S. T. Parker, R. W. Mitchell and M. L. Boccia, eds., Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 280, 281. 4 Ibid., 288. 5 Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (New York: Wiley, 1994), 7–8. 6 In her comparative study of Western and Japanese primatology Pamela Asquith makes a similar observation, arguing that the search for ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ in the nonhuman primate is itself a particularly Western phenomenon, revealing the way in which situated definitions of the boundary between human and animal affect research agendas. See Pamela Asquith, “Why Anthropomorphism is Not a Metaphor: Crossing Concepts and Cultures in Animal Behaviour Studies” in R. W. Mitchell, N. S. Thompson and H. Lynn Miles, Eds., Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes and Animals (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 22–34. See also Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, The Monkey As Mirror: symbolic transformations in Japanese History and Ritual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

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perhaps lies at the heart of the elusive nature of the term “agency” itself—we find a subjectivity, an ontological selfhood, ascribed to the language-using animal which is itself the product of a complex and changing epistemological and technological history. Talking animals have been a feature of the EuroWestern imaginary since Plato’s early musings on a shared language between human and animal and Aesop’s speaking animals in his fables exploring the human condition. However, the communicating ape has held a special place in ruminations on the nature of animal language and agency. Speculation that the ape might learn to speak certainly predates the language research projects of the late twentieth century. On encountering an ape that had been brought to Europe from Guinea, the 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys was so impressed by the apes’ similarity to humans that he pondered whether it might be taught to communicate. The ape, he wrote, “is so much like a man in most things [. . .] I do believe it already understands English and I am of the mind that it might be taught to speak and make signs.”7 The philosopher and physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie had been struck by a similar thought; impressed by reports of the intelligence of apes, La Mettrie commented that he had “very little doubt that if this animals were properly trained he might at last be taught to pronounce, and consequently know, a language.” Such a training, he suggested, would mean that the ape “would no longer be a wild man, nor a defective man, but he would be a perfect man, a little gentleman.”8 This history suggests that the nonhuman primate has always existed just outside of EuroWestern binary oppositions- a liminal creature endowed with qualities betwixt and between an agentive human selfhood and a mute animal corporeality. Yet this has been a liminality grounded in a special capacity for mimesis. As Agamben has argued, homo sapiens, that taxonomic category that has long separated the human from its ape progenitors, has always relied on a mimetic logic in which identity is “constructed as a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, sees his own image always already deformed in the

7 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, transcribed from the shorthand manuscript in the Pepysian Library, Magdalen College, Cambridge, by the Rev. Mynors. Bright, with Lord Braybrooke’s notes. Edited with additions by Henry B. Wheatley (London: Bell, 10 vols, 1897–99 [1633–1703]), 160. 8 Julien Offray La Mettrie, Man a Machine, (Illinois: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1943 [1748]).

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feature of an ape.”9 In her seminal work on representations of the nonhuman primate, Haraway too has evoked tropes of reflection: “monkeys and apes mirror humans in a complex play of distortions over centuries of western commentary.”10 While the great ape has indeed served as a mirror to shifting notions of human agency and identity, critical questions remain underexplored in these tropes of animal reflection: who, or what, is reflected in the visage of the great ape? What kind of selfhood, what kind of agency, emerges in representations of simian subjectivity? How can this allocation of selfhood to the animal agent be connected to a broader metaphysics which separates humanness from animality? In order to answer these questions, this chapter will trace a cultural and philosophic history of representations of ape agency and language. Journeying through this rich field of talking primates we find that the chatter of animality consistently voices the location and scope of human nature and agency, even if in an animal guise. Animal Humans and Human Animals EuroWestern philosophy and science has long constructed shifting yet temporarily rigid divisions between human and animal worlds. Within this history, the gap, the chasm, between animal and human has long rested on a capacity to reason, to translate reason into speech—a distinction based on a fundamental logos. Despite attempts to neatly fix the parameters of the division between humanness and animality, there have consistently appeared creatures who challenge the nature of this border. The figure of the wild man, a human-like creature that dwelt among animals in the wilderness was one such example of categorical disorder. Making frequent appearances in both the mythology and cultural politics of medieval Europe, the wild man was an hirstute and undisciplined creature, prone to bouts of lust and uncivilized in his bodily habits. Always found on the periphery of civilization, the figure of the wild man remained both a threat and a fascination, his essential animality a contradiction to his human-like visage. How might the medieval milieu make sense of the existence of these creatures on the border of humanity? Like the division between human

9

Giorgio Agamben, The Open (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 27. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions, Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 11. 10

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and animal, the gap between the wild man and the civilized human was in part grounded in the capacity for speech. Accounts often associated the wild man’s lust and irrationality, his essential animality, with his inability to communicate with words. In his compelling history of the wild man in Europe, John Bartra neatly captures the mute nature of these liminal beings; “[t]he medieval wild man was a stranger in his land, and his voice, gestures, and mimicry revealed a form of language shared by the wild beasts, a secret network of passionate messages emitted from the deep wells of nature.”11 Wildness, lasciviousness and muteness—to be animal-like was to be incapable of speech, sharing a language of mimesis with the beast, satisfied with the appetites of the body, that “secret network of passionate meanings.” While the medieval wild man was rendered alike yet essentially other on the grounds of his mute corporeality, early natural historians forged a new connection between the secret bodily language of the wilderness and the origins of human nature. Indeed for some, it was a corporeal language that connected an originary human being and the wild world outside of civilization. Descartes of course famously argued (1637) that the capacity for speech separated the rational soul of humanity from the machinations of the animal body, arguing that as a soul-less creature without a capacity for thought, the animal had no need of language. Yet while the Cartesian separation between mind/reason/speech and body/irrationality/muteness laid a firm epistemological foundation in Western knowledge practices, it by no means defined modern thinking on the question of humanity’s relationship with the animal and the role of language in articulating the parameters of the boundary between self and world. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), Rousseau suggested that humanity’s first language, the ‘cry of nature’ was proceeded by a universal language of cries, gestures and imitative noises. Condillac (1746–1780) too suggested that humanity possessed an original language of action that occurred before the use of speech, that “the elements of gesture are born with man . . . given us by the author of our nature.”12 Clearly drawing from Rousseau, Condillac claimed that bodily communication be seen as a kind of pure form of expression,

11 Roger Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass: The Mythic Origins of European Otherness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 124. 12 Etienne Bonnot Abbé de Condillac, “Treatise on Sensations” in Philosophical Writings of Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Trans., Franklin Phillip, (Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1982 [1754]), 389.

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an instantaneous means of relating feeling between men, where gesture “represents at the same time all those [feelings] that we feel at the same instant, and the simultaneous ideas in our thought are naturally simultaneous in this language.”13 In this gestural language, he argued, lie latent possibilities for the expression of “desires, fears, judgements, reasoning—in short, all the operations the mind is capable of.” It is only in the desire to make oneself understood by others, he suggested, that spoken language is created as a method for communication where “man decomposes his thoughts for himself as well as for others’ and through such analysis ‘makes himself understood as he understands himself.”14 Here, the original nature of the self, a subjecthood that in contemporary parlance might be described as a fundamental agency-inthe-world, is located in the interplay between a capacity to think and an ability to transfer thoughts into the domain of others via language—a self emerging from the natural, animal utterances and gestures of the body and into the terrain of intersubjectivity. Armed with a camera and a mirror, Koko the gorilla perhaps demonstrates these visions of latent potential—a leap from gestural language to the communication of a self via the instruments and technologies of cultural communication. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the newly discovered ape became a recurring figure in the relationship between self and language. Certainly since the first accounts of nonhuman primates in early travelers’ tales, the great ape has been linked with a species of “wild man”, neither fully animal or human.15 Throughout the Middle Ages, the ape served as both a parody of humanness and a ‘wild man’ figure, continuing to echo St Augustine’s early comment that “if we did not know that apes, monkeys and baboons are not humans, but animals, historians, eager to show off the curiosity of their knowledges, might falsely and with impunity

13

Ibid., 389. Ibid., 390. 15 For a comprehensive account of the wild man figure in European history and mythology, see for example Roger Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass: The Mythic Origins of European Otherness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), Roger Bartra, The Artificial Savage: Modern Myths of the Wild Man (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment and Demonology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), Timothy Husband, The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972), and Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of An Idea” in Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak Eds., The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from Renaissance to Romanticism (University of Pittsburgh Press: London, 1972), 150–82. 14

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describe them as human.”16 The ape held an ambiguous position in early natural history; Topsell (1607) grouped apes and satyrs together in his History of Foure-Footed Beasts, arguing that both had hairy bodies and lusted after women. In the first European account of a dissection of a great ape, Edward Tyson (1699) attempted to disentangle the weave of hybrid fusions of human and animal, arguing that “our Ape may be a Pygmie, a sort of Animal so much resembling Man, that both the Antients and the Moderns reported it to be a Puny Race of Mankind, call’d to this day, Homo Sylvestri, the Wild Man, the Orang-Outang, or Man of the Woods.”17 Yet it was the simians’ similarity to humans that led some to suggest that apes might possess a capacity to become, to leave behind their liminality and emerge into the terrain of human civilization. La Mettrie argued that the ape held a latent capacity for perfectibility, that if properly trained, the ape might be taught to pronounce, and understand, a language. In his Of the Origin and Process of Language (1773–92), Monboddo suggested that orangutans were not animals but a breed of wild men who had not yet learned to converse. Following Rousseau, he suggested that speech was not a faculty universal to humanity, but an outcome of centuries of social development. The orangutans of Angola might be seen as a “whole nation” of wild men with a potential for speech, he argued, noting that while it “appears certain that they are of our species [. . .] they have made progress in the arts of life, they have not advanced so far as to invent language.”18 Where eighteenth century thought linked language with the innate qualities of human nature and a capacity for perfectibility among the not-so-human, the next century’s evolutionary theory forged a new 16 Augustine, City of God, Trans. G. G. Walsh, D. B. Zema, G. M. Monahon, D. J. Honan (New York: Image Books, 1958), 366. 17 Edward Tyson, Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or the Anatomy of a Pygmie, Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man (London: Dawsons, 1966 [1699]), 1. See Bernheimer Wild Men in the Middle Ages, 86–95 for a discussion of apes and wild men in ancient natural history; see also Horst Waldemar Jansen, Apes and ape lore in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1976), and Raymond Corbey and Bert Theunissen, Apes, man, apeman: changing views since 1600 (Leiden, Department of Prehistory: Leiden University, 1995), for comprehensive historical accounts of apes in EuroWestern science and philosophy. Londa Schiebinger also provides an interesting and informative account of the gendered nature of ape representation in European natural history. See Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon, 1993). 18 James Burnett Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, (Volume One, New York: Garland, 1970 [1773]), 187–88.

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connection between the capacity for speech and the progress of civilization. However, a critical epistemological shift had occurred. Social Darwinian theory posited that the mute, gestural languages to be found among the more “primitive” races be seen as an atavistic throwback to uncivilized times. An identity politics of gestural language occurred, so that the “secret and beastly” mode of communication found among deaf-mutes and savages was seen as an exemplar of the unprogressed nature of a sub-humanity. Darwin himself (1871) had noted that a capacity for nonverbal communication in humans suggested that “man once lived in a much lower and animal-like condition.” He had pointed out that the use of spoken language is “peculiar to man”, though like his scientific predecessors, he found an originary connection between man and animal in bodily language. Man uses, he noted, “in common with the lower animals, inarticulate cries to express his meaning, aided by the gestures and the movements of the muscles of his face.”19 Although Social Darwinism had had complex social repercussions in the politics of empire and civility, these evolving distinctions between a communicative human selfhood and a mute animal otherness had found their way into cultural identity politics of Europe, as well as the halls and corridors of natural history, prior to Darwin’s publications. While the human-like ape had been a source of speculation over where the boundary between human and animal should be located, the “wild” human had continued to be the target of debates regarding the relationship between language and soul. In both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the “wild-child” found living among animals in the forests and woods of Europe was a particular source of fascination and speculation over the nature of the human self and its antithetical animality. What is particularly striking in historical comments on these “animal-like” humans is the recurring connection between wild children, medieval accounts of wild men, and discourses on the ape in natural history and philosophy. In his Traité de l’âme (1745), La Mettrie pointed out that in his muteness and in his animal inclinations, the feral child resembled the ape, and that like the ape, might be trained to speak given the right education. Condillac (1754) also raised the issue of wild children, suggesting that, being solely concerned with basic desires of nourishment, the feral child had no need of “ideas”, and thus lived

19 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd edition, London: John Murray, 1886 [1871]), 85.

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in a “trance-like state” of “deadened faculties”, that lacking “all the knowledge that men owe to their interactions [. . .] his life resembled sleep only disturbed by dreams.”20 In his Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773–92), Monboddo also compared the feral child and the ape, suggesting that unlike the orangutan with the potential to develop beyond a state of pre-humanity, the “wild child” belonged to a liminal half-human, half-animal race. The nineteenth century interest in wild children saw attempts to train these children into a state of human-ness, to locate the buried agency that lay within the animal exterior. Perhaps the most famous of these children was Victor of Averyron, the “feral” child who played a brief but significant role in the dawning philosophies of the Society of the Observers of Man, newly borne out of Napoleon’s revolution of Parisian society. Brought to Paris in 1799 after bring discovered living alone in the woods near the small farming village of Saint Sernin in France, Victor became the target of ongoing debates over the nature of human nature. What the society found, it was reported, was a mute, a messy and unresponsive being, a “disgusting, slovenly boy, affected with spasmodic and frequently convulsive motions, continually balancing himself like some of the animals in the menagerie.”21 Jean Itard, a young doctor at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris, charged himself with the boy’s education in the manners and language of civilized society. Victor would be taught standards of civilized bodily propriety and be trained to overcome his animality in the articulation of language. Itard’s attempts were mildly successful and Victor’s penchant for lascivious behaviour caused considerable embarrassment in public company. Victor developed an understanding of spoken English, however, with the exception of a few words, he was unable to speak. Itard’s diary during the period of Victor’s education curiously echoes earlier scholarly associations between muteness and animality; “Destitute of every meant of communication, attaching neither expression nor intention to the gestures and movements of his body,” Itard wrote, “his whole existence was a life purely animal.”22 20

Etienne Bonnot Abbé de Condillac, “Treatise on Sensations”, 331. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (London, Monthly Reviews Press, 1972), 96. 22 Ibid., 98. There are a number of published accounts of the history of Victor of Aveyron and other ‘wild children’ in European history. See for example Douglas Candland, Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993), Harlan Lane The Wild Boy of Aveyron 21

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A century later, both the ape and the wild child continued to serve as sources of speculation on the relationship between selfhood and speech, humanness and animality. After observing wild orangutans in Borneo, North American doctor and explorer William Furness pondered in 1906 whether they might be capable of learning a human language, whether orangutans were “capable of being developed to a grade of human understanding perhaps only a step below the level of the most primitive type of human being.”23 At the Psychological Clinic at Pennsylvania University, Lightner Witmer, a psychologist who worked with mentally disabled children, was asking similar questions. After watching the “humanized” chimpanzee “Peter” performing in a Boston show, where the ape roller-skated and smoked cigarettes while dressed in a tuxedo, Witmer arranged for the chimpanzee to be taken to his clinic for testing. Witmer discovered that Peter showed remarkable skills in language comprehension. “If Peter had a human form and were brought to me as a backward child”, he wrote, “I should unhesitatingly say that I could teach him to speak, to write, and to read within a year’s time.”24 Both men made efforts to teach apes to speak; while Furness managed to teach an orangutan to vocalize the words “papa” and “cup”, Witmer had been less successful, and Peter was eventually able to articulate only a strained “mama”. Intrigued by tales of wild children, the North American psychologist Winthrop Kellogg suggested that it would be useful to prove the stories of wild children by placing a human infant in “uncivilized” surroundings and record its development within that environment. Noting that this would be morally and legally problematic, Kellogg suggested a “reverse” of such an experiment, where “instead of placing a child in a typical animal environment, [one could] . . . place an animal in a typical human environment . . . with exactly the environmental advantages which a young child enjoys and then study the development of the resulting organism.”25 To achieve this aim, in 1931 Kellogg obtained a seven and a half month old chimpanzee named Gua and co-reared the ape with

(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), Joseph A. L. Singh and Robert Zingg, Wolf Children and Feral Man (New York: Harper Bros Publishers, 1939) and Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment, The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (New York: Washington Square Press, 1981). 23 Quoted in Adrian Desmond, The Ape’s Reflexion (London: Quartet Books, 1980), 62. 24 Ibid., 65. 25 Winthrop Niles Kellogg and Luella Kellogg, The Ape and Child (New York: Whittlsey, 1933), 11.

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his ten month old son Donald for a period of nine months, trying to maintain identical rearing conditions, from toilet training to learning table manners, while comparing the two primates with IQ, language comprehension, memory, perception and physiological tests. What he found over the period of experimentation was that the chimpanzee was surpassing her human counterpart in many of the tests, lacking only in her ability to vocalize words. The infant human, at the same time, was picking up chimpanzee mannerisms such as uttering barks at the sight of food.26 Several key shifts clearly took place in this historical assemblage of articulating apes and wild children, yet recurring themes emerge which point to a broad hermeneutic connection of feral children, wild men and apes as liminal entities in the Eurowestern imaginary. This hermeneutic at once links animality with a particular kind of corporeality, a mute yet bodily language that precedes the evolution of a ‘human’ subject, a human being in-waiting. At the nexus of these interconnections, we find a notion that the self can be brought into being through a renunciation or disciplining of animality. In historical accounts both feral humans and human-like apes are endowed with a child-like state of potentiality where one might become human, or at least, human-like with an appropriate education. Among both wild children and apes, this evolution of selfhood and communicable agency relied as much on the disciplining of bodies—a training in the manners befitting a civilized subject—as it did on an education in the mechanics of spoken language. What this suggests is that agency (both human and animal) is a quality that lies not simply in an ontological being, but in a politics of attribution.

26 It is not clear why the Kellogg’s abruptly terminated the experiment at nine months; Ludy T. Benjamin and Darryl Bruce suggest that it may have been because the chimpanzee was growing too large to control, that the experiment was mentally and physically exhausting and because attempts to teach Gua to speak had failed. See L. T. Benjamin and D. Bruce, “From Bottle-Fed Chimp to Bottlenose Dolphin: A Contemporary Appraisal of Winthrop Kellogg”, The Psychological Record, 32 (1982): 470–71. Another suggestion is that the Kellogg’s were becoming increasingly disenchanted at the fact that their son was picking up chimp behaviours at an alarming rate. At the conclusion to the study, Gua was returned to her cage at the Anthropoid Experiment Station at Orange Park, Florida. The public response to this might be measured by an article on the Kellogg’s and Gua that featured in Time magazine, June 19, 1933. Gua, the article notes, was returned “to lead the prison life of other chimpanzees”. See “Babe and Ape”, June 16, 1933, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,789575-2,00.html). Inspired by the Kelloggs, Keith and Cathy Hayes conducted a similar experiment with a chimpanzee. See Keith Hayes, The ape in our house (New York: Harper), 1951.

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Historically both human-like animals and animal-like humans have been granted an agentive selfhood based on the apperception that their bodily actions and communications ‘fit’ with existing conceptions of what constitutes a human-like presence-in-the-world. Never Work with Children or Animals Given the co-existence of talking apes, wild men and feral children in Western musings on the relationship between language and humanity, it is indeed striking that the second-half of the twentieth century saw the birth of experiments designed to teach non-human primates a language associated with a savage or wild humanity. While some researchers were considering the possibilities of rearing apes as humans, primatologist Robert M. Yerkes pondered whether apes might be taught to communicate using sign language, writing that: I am inclined to conclude from the various evidences that the great apes have plenty to talk about, but no gift for the use of sounds to represent individual, as contrasted with racial, feelings or ideas. Perhaps they can be taught to use their fingers, somewhat as does the deaf and dumb person, and thus helped to acquire a simple, nonvocal “sign language”.27

The second half of the twentieth century saw Yerkes’ vision of apes with “plenty to talk about” reach fruition, with an explosion in ape language experiments. The first experiments took place in 1966, when psychologists Allen and Beatrice Gardner attempted to teach sign language to the chimpanzee Washoe, who had been raised in their home since the age of one. Inspired by earlier attempts to teach a vocal human language to home-reared chimpanzees, the Gardners reasoned that such experiments had failed due to the inability of the ape’s vocal tract to articulate human sounds, and that an ape might be taught to communicate with humans using American Sign Language (AMESLAN or ASL). The process involved encouraging Washoe to imitate signs formed by humans, and molding her hands to form particular signs such as her first utterances, “gimme sweet” and “come open”. Roger and Deborah Fouts took over the project in 1970, and Washoe was moved to the Institute for Primate Studies at the University of Oklahoma. The chimpanzee was an adept pupil, producing combinations of signs to communicate

27

Robert Yerkes, Almost Human, (London: Cape, 1925), 180.

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her desires and thoughts (“you tickle me”, “Washoe sorry”), showing a good comprehension of spoken English, and utilizing signs creatively and spontaneously (“water-bird” for swan and “black bugs” to name the other chimpanzees at the Institute). Washoe also attempted to communicate in sign language with the non-signing chimpanzees in the colony and taught ASL to her adopted son. This pair was joined by other chimpanzees trained by the Gardners to form a community of signing chimpanzees at what is now the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute at Central Washington University.28 Even at the onset of ape language experiments, it was clear that there would be significant differences of opinion and divergences of practices among the ape language researchers. While the Gardners worked with Washoe, David Premack began a system of language training with the five-year old chimpanzee Sarah, who was taught to communicate using plastic discs representing words which could then be arranged to form “sentences” such as “Mary give apple Sarah”. She developed a broad vocabulary, and between 1966 and 1972, mastered 130 words, which she used to request items and to name objects, colours and people. This emerging landscape of signing simians and scientists grew with the onset of the LANA Project in 1972, when Duane Rumbaugh and a team of colleagues taught the chimpanzee Lana to communicate using lexigrams on a computer keyboard at the Yerkes Regional Primate Centre of Emory University. In 1976, Francine Patterson began teaching sign language to the gorilla Koko at Stanford University in what has become an ongoing project;29 in 1978, Herbert Terrace began a sign language project with the chimpanzee Neam Chimpsky (Nim) at Columbia University,30 while H. Lyn Miles began teaching sign to the orangutan Chantek at the University of Chattanooga in Tennessee. At around the same time, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh extended Duane Rumbaugh’s lexicon project to focus on the comprehension and communication abilities of the chimpanzees Sherman and Austin, and later,

28 Washoe died while this chapter was being written. For an early history of the Washoe project see Eugene Linden, Apes, Men and Language (Harmondsworth and New York, 1981) and Roger Fouts, Next of Kin: what chimpanzees have taught me about who we are (New York: William Morrow, 1997). 29 See www.koko.org, the website of the Gorilla Foundation. 30 After his initial enthusiasm for the project, Herbert Terrace later argued that the chimpanzee was not learning a language, but imitating his human counterparts and learning by rote. David Premack too was later disparaging of ape language research.

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the bonobos Kanzi and Panbanisha at the Language Research Centre of Georgia State University.31 Motivations for conducting ape language research differed, yet grounding the work was an investigation of the development of human linguistic and cognitive abilities, particularly through comparison of the abilities of nonhuman primates and human children. Where Terrace and Premack were interested in issues of language syntax in their comparative projects, Patterson and Savage-Rumbaugh focused on issues of “intentional communication, reference and semantics”32 and Miles on the “evolution of human language and cognition” in an “enculturated environment.”33 Terrace, Patterson, and Savage-Rumbaugh were each interested in uncovering similarities and differences between human and nonhuman minds through comparing symbol use, language development and cognition and IQ. These different research programs created a flurry of fierce debate among researchers and at the same time generated fascination among the general public. While “talking apes” were featured on television shows, in National Geographic and popular media, psychologists, linguists, primatologists and science commentators entered into a debate that appears far from being resolved. What is striking about published accounts of ape language research is their evocation of historical connections between apes, children and (un)disciplined bodies. These accounts suggest that, like earlier experiments with both feral children and humanized animals, the signing apes were and are often likened to human infants, taught the bodily and behavioural manners appropriate for a human child. Terrace (1979), for example, describes Nim’s early rearing: When he was two months old, he began to eat semisolid baby food. Indeed, there were more similarities than differences between his existence and that of a newborn infant. Nim had his diapers changed every few hours, was burped after feeding, tossed in the air, hugged, and held protectively by each of his caretakers.34

31 Sue Savage-Rumbaugh is now at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, along with Kanzi and Panbanisha. 32 Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Stuart G. Shanker, and Talbot J. Taylor, Apes, Language and the Human Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9. 33 H. Lynn Miles, “Anthropomorphism, apes and language” in ed. Robert Mitchell, Lynn Miles and Nick Thompson, Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes and Animals (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 401. 34 Herbert Terrace, Nim: A Chimpanzee Who Learned Sign Language (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), 35.

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Nim’s “personality”, he writes, was “as elusive and complicated as that of any human child.”35 Similarly, Patterson (1982) writes that Koko “was not just the subject of an experiment, she was a baby, and, I quickly discovered, as dependant and engaging as any human infant.”36 Miles (1983) suggests that engagement with the language-using primates is similar to interaction with a young child, writing that, “[t]he linguistic nature of the interaction and the long-term shared experiences within a human cultural context . . . makes communication with the animal seem more ordinary and acceptable, much like the way a child’s communications are received.”37 So too, Savage-Rumbaugh (1998) compares her experience of communicating with a nonhuman primate with that of interacting with a child: There is a kinship I recognize when I interact with young children that doesn’t depend on abstract skills. It is a kinship of awareness that others share some of my feelings and I theirs . . . with bonobos, I experience similar two-way understanding. I know how they feel and they know how I feel. This is possible because of the expressions that emanate from their faces, the way they interpret the feelings of others . . .38

Among some of the researchers, apes, like human infants, are toilettrained, taught to paint, use mirrors, sometimes wear clothing, follow planned diets and daily itineraries of activity; they are, as Miles writes, placed in a “human environment” and immersed in “human culture.”39 Terrace (1979), for example, recounts the chimpanzee Nim’s daily routine: When he was brought into the classroom, he was expected to hang his hat, sweater, and coat on a hook on the wall near the door, three feet above the floor . . . Breakfast was one of his first activities. At breakfast, as well as at other meals, Nim was expected to sit in a high chair, to eat with a spoon, and to wipe both his face and his high chair when finished. After breakfast, his teacher would show him various picture books, toys, and other objects in order to see what interested him.40

Ibid., 5. Francine Patterson and Eugene Linden, The Education of Koko (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1982), 40. 37 H. Lynn Miles, “Apes and Language: In Search of Communicative Competence” in Judith deLuce and Hugh T. Wilder, eds., Language in Primates: Perspectives and Implications (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1983), 393. 38 Sue Savage-Rumbaugh et al., Apes, Language and the Human Mind, 4. 39 H. Lynn Miles, “Anthropomorphism, Apes and Language”, 402–03. 40 Herbert Terrace, Nim, 51. 35 36

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Reference here to the generically “human” environment in which these infant ape agents are trained belies the particularly EuroWestern, contemporary nature of the technocultural landscape which these apes inhabit. Let’s again consider the way in which ape agency is represented in terms of the capacity to master the tools of the civilized world. In a recent discussion of the “capacity for representational processes” in language-trained chimpanzees Sherman and Austin, Savage-Rumbaugh (1993) indicates the way in which these nonhumans have met the challenges of a culturally situated material-technological landscape: Sherman and Austin recognized themselves on television and asked to have the television turned on so they could see themselves, engaged in imaginary play with puppets, attempted to “talk” using the same breathy sound employed by Viki, sorted photographs, played with their shadows, learned to operate a slide projector, and began using a joystick to touch a target after only a few demonstrations.41

Chantek the orangutan, reports an SNS Online article, has also been raised to master some of the key elements of modern Western life: Ms. Miles, an anthropologist, raised Chantek as if he were her own child. She fed him at 4 a.m. and even toilet trained him. As he grew up, Chantek learned to clean his room and was given an allowance, which he spent for treats such as car rides and trips to fast-food joints. Chantek proved a quick learner. He memorized the way to McDonald’s, made shadow puppets on the wall, threw tantrums and even told about three lies a week, she said.42

The gorilla Koko has entered the cyberspace chatroom, taking part in a live “interspecies” chat on AOL’s website in 1998, about which the Gorilla Foundation’s website states: “Koko is an inter-species communications pioneer and true ambassador for her species. As the first gorilla to communicate with a human, it makes sense that Koko is now breaking new ground on the Internet.”43 Indeed, Koko’s foray into cyberspace seems to support Haraway’s (1989) claims that the gorilla be seen as an interspecies communications pioneer that seems to have been “grafted onto the political theory and political economy, not to mention the consumer culture of the modern West.”44 Koko perhaps 41

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh et al., Apes, Language and the Human Mind, 11. Earth Story Page, “Gifted Orangutan Lets His Fingers Do The Talking.” http://www .cnn.com/EARTH/9711/28/signing.orangutan.ap/. 43 The Gorilla Foundation, “FAQ”, http://www.gorilla.org/faqsite/. 44 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions, 146. 42

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embodies Haraway’s claim that the figure of the cyborg, the blend of human, machine and animal modalities heralds a new age in identity politics and ontology. Yet, so too, Koko, like other communicating apes, might be seen as a contemporary hybridization of the historical “humanized” ape and “animalized” child, a cross-species blend that has a resonance deeper than the identity politics of a cyborg world. Consider medieval conceptions of the wild man, a “being completely removed from civility, incapable of hiding his body fluids, channeling his instincts”45 and compare this with Freud’s account of the human child-subject, whose superego, like the “humanity” of the feral child and the ape, lies in a state of informed potentiality in a body that gratifies animal instincts: Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges modern adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals . . . Uninhibited as they are in the avowal of their bodily needs, they no doubt feel themselves more akin to animals than their elders.46

Freud (1913) associated primitives and children in his thoughts on animism and totemism, where the child, like the primitive, blends itself with the world of animals, egoistically linked to magical world of things and beings where boundaries between human and animal have not yet evolved “human” (EuroWestern) sensory and material habitus. Yet Freud’s arguments can be situated in a broader EuroWestern teleology which recurrently associates childhood with a state of animality. “[I]n children may be observed the traces and seeds of what will one day be settled psychological habits”, wrote Aristotle, “though psychologically a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal.”47 Early modern writing on childhood makes frequent connection between the savage, the feminine, the child and animality;48 the child was heralded as possessing an untamed animality in need of civilization, or a state of purity corrupted with exposure to civilized manners.

45

Roger Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass, 145. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1983 [1913]), 126–27. 47 Aristotle, “The History of Animals”, in Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald Eds., The Animals Reader (Berg: Oxford and New York, 2007), 7. 48 See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (London: Penguin, 1983) for a useful historical account of these associations. 46

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The association of the child with the animal takes an interesting conceptual turn in ape language projects. The taming of ape bodies, like the taming of the particularly animal “instincts” allotted to feral children and indeed to the animal-like “savage”, relies on a containment of animal body habits and an education in the use of tools of the material-technological environment: a contemporary civilizing mission. While the aim of ape language researchers is certainly not to create hirstute humans, or indeed a cyborg interspecies, the training of communicating apes nevertheless highlights a pattern central to the EuroWestern articulation of difference and belonging: the construction of selfhood, of autonomous and thinking agency, as the embodied, disciplined Western subject. In both the pedagogy of child rearing and the instruction of language-using apes, agency emerges as a latent quality brought into fruition through the development of a capacity to communicate a world, to evolve out of bodily animality, to express a thought via the domain of language. The historical politics of this allocation of agency is clear; there are many “others” who have been denied the possession of a fully human selfhood due to a perceived proximity to the mute and bodily world of animality. Yet so too there is an interesting ontology of the subject complexly woven through this identity politics. Heidegger’s (1971) often cited distinction between the animal as “poor in the world” and the human as “world-forming” can be seen as an extension of the division between language and animality, the bodily and the agentive. The animal “knows” its world, he argues, yet this knowledge is grounded not in understanding, but in beingness—an ontological capacity to be, and yet not name, the world in which one exists. “Language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time” he writes. While the “world-worlds”, or exists in itself, he argues, the human “forms” that world in giving it a name, in representing it as a world through language.49 Wittgenstein too recognized a fundamental incommunicability in the world of the animal. “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”, he wrote in his investigation of the relationship between language and world; if language is to be understood, he suggested, it requires a shared arena of experience between language users, a common understanding,

49 Martin Heidegger, “On the Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought, Trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 73.

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a shared sense of self and a mutual experience of the sensory body. If the animal has its own ontology, its own world of meaning-making, he argued, then there can never be understanding between human and nonhuman, for the experiences and “forms of life” that separate human and animal are too far apart to find a common ground for understanding. In his seminal paper, Nagel (1974) posed a different yet related question—“what is it like to be a bat?”—from which he concluded that it is never possible to know an animal’s subjective state, only to know that it exists, that an animal has a sense of what it is “to be”. Here, issues of animal agency are transcended in favour of a recognition of being-as-such, and there is no suggestion that the animal might become, or emerge into a field of human-like selfhood. Yet again however, we find an ontology of being complexly woven into a situated conception of self as an agency which can be communicated via the body, via language. Mute being signifies an absence, an otherness, the essential foreignness of animal affect. In a line of flight befitting Western teleology, philosophies of animal being have been accompanied by a science of animal selfhood. In primate research, questions of animal subjectivity, or the nature of the animal “world”, have been incorporated into research methodologies that attempt to identify an animal’s capacity for self-awareness. Psychologist Gordon Gallop has been a key figure in this research, developing a test for animal self-awareness based on observing whether the animal was capable of recognizing it’s own reflection in a mirror. Gallup’s initial methodology for mirror self-recognition tests (MSR) involved anaesthetizing a nonhuman primate, marking its body and face with paint, and then placing the animal in front of the mirror to observe whether the animal was aware of the new paint marks. His experiments, and numerous others that followed these early papers, revealed that while lower order primates clearly did not link the image in the mirror with themselves, both chimpanzees and orangutans recognized their reflections as their own. Given that the ape has always served as a mirror to Euro-Western humanity’s definitions of itself, it is indeed striking that the mirror became central to Western research on the animal “mind”—a kind of literalization or material concretization of the “other” as mirror to the hidden or abject self, the nonhuman primate as a reflection of human origins. The ascription of self-consciousness to nonhuman primates has raised critical ethical questions in regard to the treatment of apes in zoological

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gardens and research laboratories50 and has been linked to recent calls for basic human rights for great apes.51 Yet it also raises broader questions of alterity in the field of human being-in-the-world. If agency is found or allocated on the grounds of a communicable, universalized selfhood contained within a disciplined body, then those outside this field of corporeal subjectivity can be rendered ontologically peripheral, allotted a place in that space which Butler (1993) has identified as that “exclusionary matrix . . . where the defining limit of the subject’s domain is constituted.”52 Where eighteenth and nineteenth century deaf-mutes and wild children were considered animal-humans, and were linked to savages by virtue of their use of nonverbal gestural languages,53 today a complex ethics continues to surround children born intellectually disabled. Philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer (1976, 1979) has of course been a central figure in these debates, controversially advocating that as they do not possess a sense of personhood or consciousness of self, human infants and intellectually disabled people fall outside the parameters of the ‘normal’ human-ness and thereby should not be subject to the same ethical considerations in medical/scientific practice.54 Certainly, the history of EuroWestern identity politics is filled with both humans and nonhumans denied the possession of agency by virtue of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and embodied difference. What we perhaps learn from ape language projects is that the agent emerges from the cultural and epistemological terrain in which it is constructed at the same time that it forms the ontological ground from which the EuroWestern conception of the self is realized. Here, we reach a a complex torsion between epistemology and ontology, between discourses 50 See, for example, Steven M. Wise, Rattling the Cage: Towards Legal Rights for Animals, (Cambridge MA: Perseus Books, 2000). 51 Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, Eds., The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity, (London: Fourth Estate, 1993). See also Susan Sperling, Animal Liberators: Research and Morality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988) for a useful account of where language using apes have been situated in broader discourses on animal liberation. 52 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. 53 For a comprehensive discussion of this connection see Douglas Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Jonathon Reé, I See A Voice: A Philosophical History (London: Flamingo, 2000). 54 Cary Wolfe elegantly explores these debates and issues of ‘speciesism’ in his work Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species and Posthumanist Theory (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2003).

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of subjecthood and the intercorporeal field of subjects and objects: the agent or self that grounds the teleology of human-ness is at once a situated product of identity politics and the grounds for an intersubjective being-in-the-world in which persons and animals are endowed with, to use Wittgenstein’s phrase, a “form of life.”55 Ape language projects have taken a more peripheral seat on the scientific stage since paleontologist Adrian Desmond’s 1979 claim that apes “growing up human” have “created an unprecedented moral crisis for mankind.”56 However, they continue to evoke a politics of difference and belonging grounded in a fundamental issue of agency—an agency located in the demarcation of subjecthood based on a distinction between poverty and perfectibility, between having a world and translating that world beyond affect into language. When asked to identify herself, Koko the gorilla communicated in sign language that she was a “fine animal gorilla”; an animal crossing into the Open, an animal signification grounded in both a reflective sameness and the secret alterity of animal utterances.

55 I refer here to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s complicated notion of ‘forms of life’ outlined in his Philosophical Investigations (London: Basil Blackwell, 1953). The human abilities of “commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting” are linked to our ability to use language he writes, abilities which separate humans from animals who, “simply do not talk. Or to it better: they do not use language” (25). Mental states, he writes, make sense only in a shared social environment; “[w]hat goes on within”, he notes, has “meaning only in the stream of life” (30). 56 Adrian Desmond, The Ape’s Reflexion, 59.

ANIMALS, AGENCY, AND ABSENCE: A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF INSTITUTIONAL ANIMAL CARE AND USE COMMITTEE MEETINGS Debra Durham and Debra Merskin A tribe that we want to enslave. The government and the scientists give out that the people of this tribe have no souls; so they can be used without any scruple for any purpose whatsoever. Naturally we are interested in their language all the same; for of course we need to give them orders and get reports from them. —Ludwig Wittgenstein1

Language constructs knowledge and knowledge is power, according to theorists, philosophers, and scholars. The words we choose to use help construct social, cultural, economic, and historical realities not only for humans, but also for other animals. As reflected in the quote above, this framing, rather than conferring privilege and position, can reduce personal agency and authority. Agency in this case is defined as an individual’s ability to determine and to exert “some degree of control over the social relations in which one is enmeshed.”2 In the case of animals used in experiments, individual agency is lost not only in the physical sense because of captivity, but also symbolically when animals are reduced to numbers, not names, and to protocols rather than personalities. How then, do people resolve the nameless and interest-less animals used in experiments with distinctly different views where animals are friends, family-members or agents in environments where they are largely unfettered by humans? The psychological discomfort that takes place when a person holds two or more opposing beliefs is known as cognitive dissonance. This term, first coined by Festinger, also suggests that an individual will employ a variety of strategies to reduce the discomfort of this

1

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1967/1981), 92. William Hamilton Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 21. 2

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uncomfortable state and achieve consonance, one of which is through language.3 One such approach is the use of terms/language that constructs experimental animals as objects and not subjects. This strategy can ease committee members’ or scientists’ discomposure in the process of imposing objective criteria on animals’ subjective experiences. This is evident in discussions among institutional animal care and use committees (IACUCs), the review committees entrusted with decision-making power over approval or disapproval of animals used in research, teaching and testing. Human beings’ “discourse of domination” about other humans and other species has been and remains a critical topic of study.4 The same critique applied to animals, however, has lagged far behind. This study contributes to and enriches this area by asking, What is the role of discourse in the oppression and exploitation of laboratory animals? We argue that language is used not only to justify experiments on animals, who lack agency in this context, but also to reduce scientists’, administrators’ and technicians’ emotional discomfort about the eff ects of experimentation. The conceptual framework of this study extends research typically applied to analyses of racism and sexism into that of speciesism by applying the tools of discourse analysis to a text taken from monthly protocol review meetings. As Bradshaw points out, “in the West, relationships between human and nonhuman animals have been largely defined by a power differential.”5 Furthermore, drawing on Scully, “this differential has denied nonhuman animals agency and a psychological life.”6 The need for this analysis is significant and urgent. We concur with Goffman’s assertion in Asylums that “total institutions” such as prisons and hospitals often over run the rights of individuals, but add this is also true for nonhuman animals.7 Therefore, the following research questions directed this study:

3 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957). 4 Joel C. Kuipers, “ ‘Medical Discourse’ in Anthropological Context: Views of Language and Power,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 3(2) (1989): 99–123. 5 Isabel Bradshaw, “Not by Bread Alone: Symbolic Loss, Trauma, and Recovery in Elephant Communities,” Society & Animals 12(2) (2004). 6 Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals and the Call to Mercy (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 2002). 7 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor, 1961), 5.

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1. How is animal pain described and deliberated? 2. Do committees discuss issues of agency, and if so, how? 3. Are there cultural or psychological barriers that interfere with effective enforcement oversight by IACUCs? Framing Fear and Suffering You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his. —Kenneth Burke8

Since Aristotle’s era, classical rhetorical analysis served as a method to understand motivations behind the choice of persuasive words and phrases. Studying the words people use is one way to get at buried meaning. This perspective embraces not only outcome but also goes beyond a traditional rhetorical analysis by unveiling hidden motivations or goals behind word and phrase choices within a text. While rhetorical and discourse analyses pose both epistemological and ontological questions, studies of discourse emphasize the role of language as a hegemonic tool that actively constructs a worldview. Furthermore, drawing on Bakhtin, we claim that language is never neutral, and selecting particular words and phrases works to articulate an individual’s beliefs as a form of disclosure.9 For Bakhtin, language is ideological and dialogic—we speak out of bounded systems of constructed knowing and every utterance is a “two-sided act.”10 This means that a word is chosen specifically due to its shared territory between sender and receiver—it is both ideological and social. As a manner of questioning words and the power structures behind them, discourse analysis provides a mechanism through which message and motivation are revealed. Typically, it has been used to address the context and foundations for the assumptions contained within it. Discourse analysis, as method, is used to ferret out coded terms and phrases that signify something-else that is going on during an exchange.

8 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 55. 9 Mikhail Bakhtin Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislave Matejka and I. R. Tutunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973). 10 Bakhtin, 9.

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Discourse analysis of “talk and texts” also includes a discussion of the consequences of particular word choices.11 Advertising is an obvious example of a text (visually and verbally) constructed with the intent of selling a product by persuading the consumer to buy it. Another use is political discourse and speechmaking intended to persuade citizens to vote for a particular candidate. Importantly, linguistic patterns in discourse are contextualized as part of what has come to be called a “cultural turn” constituted by exploring a culture through its own mechanisms, such as speech patterns, use of symbols, or nonverbal signals. In addition, this analysis acknowledges that forces outside of a particular culture can influence those within it, such as economics, policies, and politics. It is important to stress the performative aspects of discourse, as it is “used for many purposes over and above merely describing things.”12 Kuipers identifies three approaches to the study of medical discourse: (1) referential, (2) (post)structural, and (3) interactional. In the first case, users view language as “a tool for reference and rapport.”13 A (post)structural perspective links the previous articulation with issues of discourse, power, and institutional structures. The shortcoming of this view, however, is that it ignores situated, lived-realities of subjects and objects. Therefore, an interactional approach weaves together the group-speak process of in-group discourse with actual practices and experiences, resulting in the “institutionalization of discourse” which forms the foundation of the present analysis.14 In this chapter we draw on de Saussure’s linguistic theory and the theories of Barthes who argues all cultural forms can be analyzed as if they were language, Derrida who states meaning is unstable, and Foucault who sees the connection between meaning, power, and agency.15 In fact, Foucault has been called “the first major writer to pose the question

11 Andrew McKinlay and Jonathan Potter “Model Discourse: Interpretative Repertoires in Scientists Conference Talk.” Social Studies of Science 17(3) (1987): 443. 12 McKinlay and Potter, 444. 13 Kuipers, 99. 14 Kuipers, 99. 15 Ferdinand de Sassure, Course in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966). Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gail C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976). Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

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of power in relation to discourse.”16 He examined how power “installs itself and produces real material effects,” evidenced by its preponderance in institutions and in everyday life.17 Thus, as an analytic topic, a post-structuralist view of discourse carries with it the idea that “language embodies the ‘sediment’ of social practices which undermine its use as a neutral descriptive medium.”18 Simply put, language is loaded with political and emotional motivations. Speaking of Animals Scientific discourse, as a specialty and subgroup, consists of its own language communities—scientists, administrators, technicians—who frame a way of knowing and a way to work that creates in-group understandings of technical terms and emphasize the existence of out-groups. McKinlay and Potter, for example, examined the organization of psychologists’ discourse regarding scientific models.19 Their research revealed dual motivations in these medical agents’ use of language as a way of maintaining the appearance of credibility, even when they felt internally uncertain, to maintain psychological equilibrium between actions and belief. Institutions with a financial investment in animal research have a tried-and-true repertoire of claims about the value of their review processes and the protection those processes are intended to provide for animals. Indeed the public has high expectations of these protections and for accountability. For example, public opinion polls indicate that many people’s tolerance of animal experiments is based at least in part on the condition that the experiments are humane and the belief that oversight is strong.20 Furthermore, failures to protect animals in research settings are met by public outcry.21

16 Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace, A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 22. 17 McHoul and Grace, 22. 18 McKinlay and Potter, 444. 19 McKinlay and Potter. 20 Ipsos MORI, “Use of Animals in Medical Research.” http://www.ipsos-mori .com/polls/2005/pdf/cmp.pdf. 21 Andrea Camden “Dog Dies in Surgical Sales Demonstration,” WBNS TV, Cleveland, OH. January 12, 2007.

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The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports the results of inspections of these committees and their institutions. The committees, which were first mandated as a result of amendments to the Animal Welfare Act, are also required to self-report any violations to officials at the National Institutes of Health if their institution receives federal funding. Though the regulatory framework for the committees is federal, day-to-day conduct and monthly meetings typically take place behind closed doors within the institutions themselves. One survey suggested that 80% of IACUC meetings are not open to the campus or to the public.22 Since laboratory conditions and practices are not generally transparent and and/or open to public scrutiny, it can be difficult to know whether existing review mechanisms succeed in satisfying legal and ethical obligations to protect animals. Fortunately, some meetings are open to the public by virtue of state open public meetings laws. This is the case at the research institution whose monthly protocol review meetings we reviewed.23 In the U.S., regulation of the use of animals in research, teaching, and testing and the existence of IACUCs that are charged with local review and compliance oversight of these activities is determined in part by: (1) the species of (non-human) animal used, and (2) the receipt of government funding. The Animal Welfare Act (AWA or “the Act”) requires all public and private institutions that use animals in the United States to be registered with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and abide by the Act, but only if they use species that are covered under the AWA. With respect to the second part of the criteria, if the federal government issues a grant to an institution, it must abide by the U.S. Government Principles for the Utilization and Care of Vertebrate Animals Used in Testing, Research and Training and other rules set forth by the agency in question.24 Some agencies (e.g. Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health) have further requirements outlined in their own policies and in a government publication entitled The Guide

22 Jerald Silverman, Mark A. Suckow, and Sreekant Murthy 2007, The IACUC Handbook, 2nd ed. (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2007), 420. 23 IRB approval was not required for this study of archival tapes and transcripts. 24 Interagency Research Animal Committee, U.S. Government Principles for Utilization and Care of Vertebrate Animals Used in Testing, Research, and Training. Federal Register, May 20, 1985. Washington, DC: Office of Science and Technology Policy.

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for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (National Resource Council 1996), commonly referenced simply as The Guide. The AWA and other federal regulations governing animal experiments direct institutions, committees, and those who conduct experiments on animals to minimize pain and suffering. In fact, the human experience serves as a point of reference for what is considered painful. For example, The Guide states, “. . . in general, unless the contrary is known or established it should be assumed that procedures that cause pain in humans also cause pain in animals.”25 Not all animals are protected equally under these regulations. Indeed, many animals are excluded from the legal definition of “animal” in the AWA, including mice, rats, and cold-blooded beings. These animals who are stripped even of their animalhood are relegated to status as “unregulated species,” which receive no protection under the Act. In fact, estimates indicate that roughly 80–90% animal experiments are conducted on animal species not covered by the Act.26 These numbers are not insignificant. For example, approximately 100 million transgenic mice are used or killed in laboratories annually in the U.S. alone and roughly 750,000 of those are “disposed of unused.”27 All US public or private business, schools, research foundations, and institutions governed by the AWA or the US Government Principles must have an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) or its equivalent. The committees are appointed by an institutional official. Like most typical committees, every IACUC has a chairperson. The IACUC must also include a veterinarian and a member who is not affiliated with the institution—often called the community or public member. While many members are scientists or animal users, at least one member is a non-scientist, a role that the public member often fills. All members are expected to be familiar with the relevant laws and regulations in order to fulfill their duties and functions. Two of the committee’s most important activities are the review of applications to use animals in research, teaching and testing, and

25 National Resource Council, Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. Washington DC: National Academy of Science. http://books.nap.edu/readingroom/ books/labrats/index.html, 1996, 64). 26 Barbara F. Orlans, “The Injustice of Excluding Laboratory Rats, Mice and Birds from the Animal Welfare Act.” Kennedy Institute for Ethics Journal 10(3) (2000): 229. 27 Madhusree Mukerjee, “Speaking for the Animals.” Scientific American 291(2) (2005), 96.

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compliance oversight for animal care and use. The IACUC reviews applications to use animals, may suggest or require modifications and votes to approve or deny permission for the activities requested in an application. When laws or regulations are violated, the committee is charged with taking corrective action, determining disciplinary response, if any, and reporting the incidents to the appropriate agencies. Despite the widespread existence of these committees (there are over 1200 research licensees registered with the USDA) and their significance for animal welfare, we know relatively little about the discourse that takes place during IACUC meetings, in part because they are often closed to the public. There are few analyses of how IACUCs execute their duties and most have focused on the degree of consistency, or lack thereof, between IACUC decisions and practices between institutions. IACUCs nearly always approve the protocols submitted to them for review, but the rigor and consistency of the review process are another matter entirely.28 Given the legal mandates to minimize pain and suffering, it would be logical to predict that a careful deliberation of protocols that involved painful and traumatic procedures such as electric shock or food deprivation would have greater concordance. The few studies conducted and published have found that IACUC practices, reviews, and actions vary wildly. 29 The seminal Plous & Hertzog comparative study found inconsistencies across committees 79% of the time.30 For example, experimental reviewers were asked to rate protocols from other institutions in terms of the content, value, quality, and degree of anticipated pain. Forty percent of reviewers in the studysaid that the clinical or applied value of the protocols were “not too valuable” or “not valuable at all.” Thirty one percent of protocols received the same low ratings for their basic research value. Only about 9 percent of protocols were rated as being of “excellent” quality. Just under half of the reviewers in the study (46.7%) indicated that the protocols reviewed involved significant or intolerable pain or distress for vertebrate animals.31 This level of consistency, though roughly similar to a coin toss, was one of the highest levels of agreement reported by the 28 Scott Plous and Harold Hertzog, “Reliability of Protocol Reviews for Animal Research,” Science 23 (5530) (2001): 608. 29 Scott Plous and Harold Herzog, “Reliability of Protocol Reviews for Animal Research,” Science 23 (5530) (2001): 608–09. Jerald Silverman, Mark A. Suckow, and Murthy The IACUC Handbook, 2nd ed. (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2007). 30 Plous and Herzog, 609. 31 Plous and Herzog, 608.

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authors. Concerned about the inconsistency across a range of functions and topics, the authors pointed out that their results were similar to findings of IACUCs and other peer-review mechanisms. They note: Our results are not anomalous. They are consistent with previous research on unstructured peer review, including studies of IACUC and IRB decision-making, manuscript reviewing, and grant reviewing. Therefore, we ask the following question: At what point is the IACUC system sufficiently well established, and the evidence of a problem sufficiently documented, for us to take action?32

Kuipers’ “institutionalization of discourse” provides a gateway into how or if language used at these review meetings works to support compliance problems and cover ideas of animal suffering through the use of euphemisms for animals’ experiences.33 In addition to measuring consistency in how policies are interpreted and practiced, and outcomes of the oversight mechanisms, we suggest that the process and language of oversight committee business deserves scholarly attention. The inherent contradiction between the treatment of animals as laboratory tools/supplies and the regulatory imperative to assess subjective states such as suffering by reference to the human experience makes dialogue about animal experiments an interesting text within which to examine the issue of animal agency and ethical questions surrounding their continued use in research. The next section of this chapter explores the role of language in constructing social and cultural realities as well as the psychological processes that motivate such constructions. Analysis Videotaped and transcribed proceedings from four meetings of the IACUC at a large public university are the basis for this analysis. Although unnecessary because of the open public meeting nature of the IACUC meeting, nevertheless, committee members’ names are replaced in this discussion by letters, e.g. Member A, Member B, and so forth. Both authors reviewed the tapes and transcripts, in part or in whole. The archival nature of videotapes and transcriptions allows

32

Harry Klemfuss, Nancy K. Dess, Susan E. Brandon, Howard H. Garrison, Marky Pitts, Bernard Rollin, F. M. Loew, Scott Plous, and Harold Herzog, “Assessing the Reviewers of Animal Research,” Science 294 (5548) (2001), 1832. 33 Kuipers, 99.

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for close examination of text to ascertain whether or not there were contradictions between the committee’s charge under the AWA and whether other regulations conflict with institutional goals to “facilitate” research and a member’s own self-identity. Particular attention is paid to the committee’s talk about treatment of pain and agency. The following section answers these issues as identified in illustrative examples of text. How is Animal Pain Described and Deliberated? Protocol review and approval are central to the duties of an IACUC. While some proposals for animal experiments are reviewed by one individual appointed as a designated reviewer, the committee as a whole considers other proposals. The examples used here are all cases of the latter. Partial words are spelled phonetically and pauses or statements that ended without being completed are denoted by ellipses. In this example, Member C introduces a protocol for the committee to vote on. Member C provides basic facts, such as the protocol number and the date the forms were received, and then describes the proposed experiment: MEMBER C: Now I’m going to go into the model a little bit. I have . . . some concerns about it. And so what these people are going to do in this model is that they’re going to anesthetize mice with phenobarbital, they’re going to clip the dorsal fur off the animal, and then they’re going to place them [i.e. the animals] in an insulating mould device with an opening calculated to expose approximately 30% of the body surface area.

Clearly, the speaker is explicit about “concerns,” but rather than describe them, Member C proceeds to describe what “these people” (the scientists who have proposed the experiment) will do in the experiment. For the first three actions, Member C discusses described actions that affected animals, either plural or singular as mice, animal, and “them.” In the last part, the speaker shifts the focus to the “body surface area”—not the mouse, a mouse’s body or the mouse’s back. MEMBER C: Ok. Then the exposed skin will be exposed to hot water to cause a scald wound of the dorsal skin. And what they mean by hot water is 60 degrees Celsius, which translates to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. And they’re going to leave the animals in the water for 18 to 25 seconds. And then . . . um . . . they’re going to . . . let’s see . . . they’re going to um . . . deb . . . they’re going to use um . . . they’re going to debraid . . .

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debraid the area. They’re going to scrub the area to debraid the skin and then they’re going to do that with sterile gauze—and then they’re going to rinse it with sterile water.

Most verbs describe what was done to skin, not to an animal or to an animal’s skin, and the violent act of burning the mice is stated in a passive voice and reframed as exposure. For example, “The skin is exposed to hot water” rather than “the experimenter burns a mouse over 30% of his body in scalding hot water.” This act causes a “scald wound of the dorsal skin,” not the mouse per se. Rather than more precisely stating who burns each animal continuously for 18–25 seconds, Member C says “they” simply “leave them in the water.” “Leaving” can be cruel and even morally wrong in some contexts, such as leaving the scene of a crime or leaving someone for dead. Here, the language suggests the act as far more benign than “burn” or “scald,” which more accurately describes what happens and involves the active and intentional injury of the animal(s). In addition, apparently as a sign of psychological discomfort, the speaker makes many false starts and pauses when describing how the experimenter will scrub, “debraid” [sic] and rinse specific body parts of each mouse after he or she is burned—“the area,” “the skin,” and “it.” Thus, there is no whole, living, breathing, feeling, badly burned mouse anywhere in this description. What the mice experience has yet to be deliberated. In other places in the discussion, the dialogue centered on the “experimental” and “control” groups, a reference to the study design, rather than to the individual mice or their experiences. About 10 minutes later, the subject of pain again arises: MEMBER C: Well I didn’t know—that’s another thing as I was looking at this—umm I didn’t know . . . um . . . how painful those burns would be. I mean 140 degree water . . . for 28 minutes.

Multiple committee members correct MEMBER C: seconds . . . 28 seconds. MEMBER C: 28 seconds. I’m sorry. [laughter by group at misspeak by MEMBER C] MEMBER B: Can you . . . uh . . . can you comment on that? I mean . . . I’m kind of out of my league. MEMBER D: No, I don’t really know. I was . . . MEMBER B: I don’t . . . I don’t have a great answer for that, either. So, we could recommend monitoring.

Probably every adult has experienced a burn of some sort at some point in life, whether from taking a bite of food that is too hot, or touching

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a hot iron, or a hot car radiator, and yet none of the members initially seemed prepared to discuss how painful these burns would be despite the regulatory imperative to assess and minimize pain. By contrast, most members were willing to point out when the speaker misspoke how long the mice would be burned at one point and laughed, as if burning for 28 minutes would be outrageous but 28 seconds was assumed to be acceptable. Why? Some members do go on to discuss pain as a subjective experience: MEMBER D: Scalds hurt a lot anyway. MEMBER F: Yeah. MEMBER D: Just anytime you do that to yourself—just think, the last time you spilled your coffee. MEMBER C: I mean ’cause . . . one thing I wondered about this protocol, I know they’re using um analgesics, but . . . I think this might be leaning toward a Category 3, depending on . . . MEMBER B: Because you’re afraid the analgesics won’t be sufficient. I mean, they’re doing two things. They’re using analgesics and they are using an occlusive dressings, which people who work on burns assure me makes a huge difference um in pain. MEMBER C: Yeah, but burns over 30% of your body seems . . . MEMBER B: I . . . I don’t disagree. Should we put it on monitoring?

The committee did ultimately elect to put this protocol on monitoring, which means that a veterinarian monitored the experiments to ensure that the approved procedures achieved the desired result, in this case adequate pain control. Despite the monitoring, the experiments were plagued by complications with the anesthesia and pain control over a period of months and thus arose as a topic of discussion in multiple committee meetings. While the pain and suffering that some of the mice experienced would have been worse without the monitoring because of lack of corrective action, those individual mice who did not receive adequate anesthesia and/or pain medicine at earlier stages of the experiments suffered from preventable pain. Issues of Agency In the example below, we examined a discussion about another function of the committee, the compliance oversight of experiments that have already been through the review and approval process like the one addressed above. Once approved, the experiments must comply with laws and regulations in practice. Here, the IACUC discusses whether

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and how the committee will respond on a specific case where the federal government had determined that there were violations. One other difference in this example is that the experiment under discussion involves monkeys rather than mice. While there are certain clauses in the laws and regulations that are specific to primates, e.g. the minimum size of cage and acceptable room temperatures, these are not being deliberated. The IACUCs duties and responsibilities in cases where people conducting experiments do not comply with laws and regulations is general in nature and is not dependent upon the species in question. The committee discusses a decision to bar the use of “non-compliant data” that resulted from violations of federal laws and regulations, i.e. the results of experiments that violated laws and/or regulations. Noncompliance means, in this case, the failure to comply with regulations. While we would normally say that someone violates or breaks the law, in our experience this is not the language used by this committee. The acts themselves result in a state of “non-compliance” or cause a “non-compliance item.” Non-compliance is a property of a protocol or even an animal. In fact, MEMBER A introduces the deliberation by saying that they are reviewing “. . . animals associated with [type of grant] that could potentially have noncompliances.” In this case, the violation resulted not only in consequences for the animals, including unauthorized surgeries and medical complications, but also in experimental results that are now a contested commodity. First, a committee member begins by discussing how the government decision will affect “a few” monkeys who have been subjected to unauthorized procedures by virtue of the fact that the data gathered as a result of unauthorized procedures cannot be used for gain, i.e. in grant applications or publications: MEMBER A: So . . . if nothing from those animals can be used, then I’m not sure . . . I mean . . . that would imply that they should just be euthanized immediately.

The if/then contingency at the heart of the speaker’s statement makes the value of the monkeys in question dependent upon perceived benefit from their use and in so doing effectively reduces their very existence to data points extracted from the monkeys through the experiment. Euthanized is, of course, an alternative word for kill. The monkeys are no longer individuals but disposable commodities. The member’s statements continue:

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debra durham and debra merskin MEMBER A: So I asked this question in a phone call and I was advised not to do anything like that at this time that that final decision would have to be made.

The “final decision” in question was not whether or not the university should or would kill the monkeys, but rather whether or not the government agency would decide to allow the grantees to use any of the data generated as a consequence of the unauthorized experiments. MEMBER B joins the dialogue: So it would indeed be ironic if the question raised in the welfare of the animals led to the earlier death of the animal.

The unstated assumption here is that if the data cannot be used, then someone will kill the animal straight away. The speaker distances herself from both the act of killing and the necessary actor by stating the outcome as “death” rather than the act of killing. Survivors of disasters and atrocities that killed their loved ones use this same strategy, i.e. talk about the outcome rather than the cause.34 Though there is implicit acknowledgment that the animal will be killed at some point by virtue of what happens in the experiments, the “irony” suggested by the speaker is that someone will now kill that animal “earlier.” The speaker does not address the legal or ethical costs of either being subjected to unauthorized experiments or being killed as part of an experiment per se. Rather this exchange occurs completely outside the context of any discussion of the actual pain and suffering or “welfare” of a particular individual. The committee members are still talking about the value of the animal strictly as producers or sources of data, as study objects. At this point, MEMBER A responds to MEMBER B’s comments, though addressing the full committee: MEMBER A: . . . if that animal has . . . given part of its life for scientific research and data, I’m . . . I’m, in my own mind and heart, having trouble with the idea of just throwing that away as if it never happened. I’m not sure what that says somebody thinks about that animal’s life . . . and so, that’s a big concern of mine. It’s a different argument whether it ever should ever have been in research or not. It was. Data were collected. Are we going to just throw them away?

34 Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 134.

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At the end, the pronoun “them” references the data, which references the animal only indirectly. However, it is less clear where the committee member refers to the “idea of just throwing that away” what is the “that” and the contingent “it” that would be regarded as having never happened? The animal? The research or perhaps a reference to data, which are sometimes referred to in the singular? Another possible referent is the process or act that the speaker described as an animal having “given part of its life.” By design, all of the animals used in this study are eventually killed, but the committee is not talking about the act of killing or any of the euphemisms such as “sacrifice,” “dispose of,” “euthanize,” “finished with,” or “study endpoint,” that are otherwise used to describe killing. And while animals’ bodies are literally thrown away when experiments are done, i.e, sent to a dump or tossed into an incinerator, it does not appear that treating the animals like trash is what the speaker is driving at. Rather, the speaker seems to be suggesting that the trouble stems from throwing away the data as if the animal had not “given part of its [sic] life” for data. Critics of the peace movement sometimes invoke similar analogies and challenges based on the morality of sacrifice, for example, by suggesting that opposition to a war is unjustifiable because devalues or dishonors what soldiers have “given” for the war. A related argument states that opposition to war is tantamount to opposition to the troops. This may be another parallel to what MEMBER A is saying, since the speaker links data that are thrown away to what “somebody” thinks about an animal’s life. Thus, the speaker’s statement suggests that if regulators and/or animal advocates say that people who violate protection standards cannot profit or benefit from their violations, denying benefit is the act that devalues an animal because s/he “dies for nothing.” The suffering or certainty of death resulting from the experiments are irrelevant in MEMBER A’s framework because they are explicitly predicated on the assumption that the question of whether it is ethical to use animals in experiments is completely separate. It is not clear why this should be the case, since society generally does consider context and circumstance when making ethical determinations. While some people equate vivisection with an undeclared war on animals and unwilling human subjects, this may be where the parallel ends, in part because of the issues of agency and consent. While the act of “giving its life” described in this passage implies some form of agency, as with the more or less voluntary participation, compliance

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or obedience of other animals in other settings (See Onion and Clark in this volume), this attribution is in word only. Of course, the act of giving one’s life to research requires both agency and consent. There is certainly no voluntary aspect or consent in these experiments. While these are part of the ideal conditions under which people participate in clinical studies, there is considerable controversy over issues such as requisites for consent, incentives, lasting harms and vulnerable groups.35 In animal experiments, neither individual volition nor permission are considered, and in some cases are not presumed to exist or be legitimate ethical concerns. A primary reason for exclusion is humans and animals do not speak the same language and animals do not have the same arrangement as us or with us about language and power. This is a coercive power as animals “do not consent to their treatment because of a ‘false consciousness’ generated through ideology assumptions contained in discourse.”36 If We Listen We Can Hear Them Dealing with the issue of the pain inflicted on animals by people conducting experiments appears to be an uncomfortable topic for the IACUC, and one where uncertainty was high. Yet, the issue of pain is central to regulatory and ethical imperatives. What happens in these discussions and what are the consequences? We know from the experimental work of Plous and Herzog that pain and discomfort do not appear to have a relationship to rates of approval by committees, despite the previously noted limited to moderate level of agreement across committees about what is and is not painful. The fact that committee members and those writing proposals rely so heavily on the language of the regulations and make efforts to remove emotion from their discourse rather than using the natural language of personal, subjective experiences may limit the naming and discussion of pain. Providing language and points of reference that are familiar and acceptable in an environment where dissent is rare may be a key to frank discussions of pain that give adequate consideration to what animals experience

35

M. H. Kottow, “Who is My Brother’s Keeper?” Journal of Medical Ethics 28(1) (2002), 24–27. 36 Arran Stibbe, “Language, Power, and the Social Construction of Animals,” Society and Animals 9(2) (2001): 146.

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during painful experiments. Pain scales provide one framework for this process.37 Such scales, though used and accepted as beneficial in Europe, in our experience were not employed by the committee we reviewed here. In his book What Animals Want, veterinarian Larry Carbone suggests, that for people who are involved in animal experiments distancing from the issues of pain and suffering may be a matter of protecting selfidentity, i.e. reducing dissonance: “Protecting their self-identification as someone who would not hurt animals could lead these people, ironically, to refuse to see that their animals might indeed be in pain.”38 It is logical that this same contradiction might affect some IACUC members as well. Giving explicit approval to experiments on hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of animals could be equated as giving approval to pain, suffering, trauma and death for those same animals—an act that is inimical to identification as “someone who would not hurt animals.” Is this what reduces the conversation about the experiment that burned mice over 30% of their bodies to one about monitoring and dorsal skin? Or what motivates committee members to make explicit statements that people, quite often colleagues, who have violated federal laws or regulations or have caused pain and suffering for animals are “good,” “nice,” and “cooperative”? The psychological disparities between maintaining an animal-loving identity and reviewing and approving experiments as a committee member seem to create an environment where discursive strategies are commonly employed to reduce dissonance about self and their colleagues. Akeroyd notes, “Scientists are trained to suppress emotions, to avoid empathizing with their animals (empathy is ‘unmanly’), and to see laboratory animals as not having moral claims.”39 When animals are seen as pieces and parts of apparatus, the tendency is to treat them as abstract concepts rather than empathize with the lived reality of the

37 Barbara F. Orlans, “Public Policies on Assessing and Reporting Degrees of Animal Harm: International Perspectives,” ed. Michael Balls, A. M. van Zeller, and M. E. Halder, Progress in the Reduction, Refinement and Replacement of Animal Experimentation (London: Elsevier Science, 2000), 1075–82. 38 Larry Carbone, What Animals Want: Expertise and Advocacy in Animal Welfare Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 151. 39 Anne V. Akeroyd, “Feminism, Animals, and Science: The Naming of the Shrew,” Book review by Lynda I. A. Birke. Science, Technology, & Human Values 212 (1996), 230.

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animals.40 Tom Regan points out “our enjoyment and suffering make[s] a difference to the quality of our lives as lived by us as individuals [T] he same is true of animals.”41 Clearly, “nonhuman animals are considered to be resources, species, subspecies, varieties, subpopulations, objects of abuse, moral categories, possessors of rights, or entities whose value lies either in rarity, size, or in their ability to mimic human behavior”—so it is important to have a willingness to see the world from their perspective, which is not encouraged by the discourse.42 An examination of the text for this study reveals non-human pain is not, in fact, regarded as a subjective experience for animals used in experiments. Our analysis of IACUC discussions reveals how the committee’s referential language constrains its welfare duties and how animal pain and suffering is hidden behind discourse that conceals this reality. Indeed, one respondent in a recent survey conducted by Nature commented, “I have heard animal-research advocates say that you have to say everything as nicely as possible, and that edges towards fabrication.”43 But if people who conduct experiments or the IACUCs that approve them conceal or refuse to acknowledge pain and suffering, there is no way to fulfill the ethical or legal obligations to avoid or minimize animals’ experiences of them. Donovan poignantly points out, “We should not kill, eat, torture or exploit animals because they do not want to be so treated, and we know that. If we listen, we can hear them.”44 Listening requires not only sensitivity to what we empathetically envision confined animals are saying and feeling, but also awareness of, in this case, the discourse used to describe the conditions in which they live and die. The discourse used suggests that this listening may be difficult for some members of this committee and potentially other committees as well. Certainly, giving language and meaning to the experiences of

40

Linda Birke, in “Exploring the Boundaries: Feminism, Animals, and Science,” ed. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Duke University Press, 1999), 45, points out “even the title ‘lab animals’ is a bit of a misnomer, since very few actually live in the laboratory. Rather, they live in specialized animal houses. Of those bred in any one institutional animal house, relatively few actually enter laboratories.” 41 Tom Regan, “The case for strong animal rights.” Ed. Andrew Harnack. Animal Rights: Opposing Viewpoints (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996), 37. 42 Regan. 43 Emma Marris, “Grey Matters,” Nature 444(7121) (2006), 809. 44 Josephine Donovan, “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory,” Signs 15(2) (1990), 375.

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animals and the terrible toll exacted on them during experiments was uncommon. In addition to the issue of self-identity noted above, the inability or unwillingness not just to empathize, but to share in the pain and suffering of the animals at the psychic level may be another barrier. Judith Herman notes that our indirect experience of trauma—the pain and suffering of others—requires people—at least subconsciously, share that pain. “It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain.”45 Fear of criticism from colleagues may also be an issue. A series of papers published in the scientific journal Nature in December 2006 suggested that the cultural pressure within science to adhere to the rhetoric of the animal research industry is very powerful. Scientists interviewed for the project pointed to these rhetorical rules repeatedly and stated that those who express ethical or scientific concerns or who shift away from animal experiments to other methods are eschewed and criticized. While it was common for respondents to cite pressure from extrinsic sources such as regulatory bodies and societal disapproval or activism, intrinsic factors were also named.46 Indeed Marris noted, “In some labs, at least, scientists feel pressured to keep quiet about the grey areas of debate, lest they undermine the official mantra.”47 One interviewee said, “I am more concerned that the scientific community, rather than the animal-rights movement, makes it difficult to voice a nuanced opinion on animal research.”48 Regardless of the reasons that serious dialogue on pain and suffering is shrouded by the language of uncertainty or painted with unfeeling regulatory language, and irrespective of psychological barriers that arise internally, externally, or in concert, IACUC members have an obligation to confront the issues of animal suffering. The duties of IACUC members are externally codified by law and by societal expectations. When the stakes are as high as they are with the pain and suffering of animals, committee members cannot take the stance that their emotional discomfort can ethically or legally abdicate their duties under current laws and regulations.

45 46 47 48

Herman, 7–8. Marris, 808. Marris, 808. Marris, 790.

SECTION IV

HUMANIMALS AND OTHER MARGINAL SPECIES

“TO ABANDON THE COLONIAL ANIMAL”: “RACE,” ANIMALS, AND THE FERAL CHILD IN KIPLING’S MOWGLI STORIES Dipika Nath How little! How naked, and—how bold! [. . .] And so this is a man’s cub. Now was there ever a wolf that could boast of a man’s cub among her children? [. . .] I have heard now and again of such a thing, but never in our Pack or in my time. [. . .] I could kill him with a touch of my foot. But see, he looks up and is not afraid. [. . .] The man’s cub . . . shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the Pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs [Shere Khan] . . . he shall hunt thee! [. . .] He came naked, by night, alone and very hungry; yet he is not afraid! Look, he has pushed one of my babes to one side already. Rudyard Kipling1 While the stories [in The Jungle Books] appear to narrate an Indian space, the images and constructions of nation produced stem from an understanding of Englishness as a site of colonial authority. [. . .] Kipling’s colonial animals map a racialized contrastive space where national identity is inseparable from racial identity, leading Kipling finally to abandon the colonial animal in order to be able to represent proper Englishness. [. . .] Indeed, all animals are not equal but they too are represented in racialized and nationed terms, which points to the flexibility of the animal trope in colonial discourse. Jopi Nyman2

1 Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books, I & II (New York: Doubleday, 1948), I, 7–10. All page numbers for the Mowgli stories in The Jungle Books are taken from this edition and appear in the text. 2 Jopi Nyman, “Re-Reading Rudyard Kipling’s ‘English’ Heroism: Narrating Nation in The Jungle Book,” Orbis Litterarum 56 (2001): 205.

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dipika nath The idea of imperial ascendancy had implications for human relations with animals, no less than for relations between people. While some animals were to be sheltered from danger, others were classified as vermin. They were compared to human outlaws. The parallel was not merely a metaphorical one, given the energy and money expended on the efforts to wipe out such vermin. Mahesh Rangarajan3

The term “feral children” refers to three kinds of individuals, often discovered in childhood, living in isolation from human society: one, individuals found living in the wild by themselves; two, those found living among animals,4 considered to have been raised by them and exhibiting “animal-like” cognitive, sensory, and physiological traits and behaviours;5 and, three, individuals raised in extreme isolation by their human caretakers. First recorded in Europe in the sixteenth century, feral children are enigmatic figures that have raised questions about what is natural or human in human nature and about the place of culture and education in crafting “the human.” The absence of speech and self-identification, in combination with such characteristics as fourfootedness, asociality, and a preference for raw food, including flesh, has traditionally resulted in philosophical, scientific, and cultural anxiety about the traffic between “animal” and “human” in the feral child.6

3 Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860–1914 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). 4 I use the term “animals” to refer exclusively to nonhuman animals. This is primarily for linguistic convenience. 5 Whether individuals were found in animal company or in isolation, their “animality” was often little more than their deviance from normative humanity. This animalness lay in what they were incapable of doing (speaking, walking on two legs), in the development of extraordinary sensory and physiological capacities, such as a keen sense of smell and their ability to run on all fours, as well as in their “wild” appearance and “uncivilised” mannerisms. A preference for raw flesh, although not universally found, is a common trait and one that rendered them most viscerally animal-like. Absence of language may, however, be the most disturbing trait of feral children. While dietary preferences and four-footedness could be forcibly changed or at least restricted, feral children’s reticence about their past—and with it perhaps the past or origin of humanity—could not be broken. Even in cases where they acquired language, as in the case of Memmie Le Blanc (1731), they were unable to provide an insight into their earlier non-linguistic selves. 6 All these characteristics are not found uniformly or universally in all feral children but they are common enough that they may be used to develop a provisional type. For detailed descriptions of feral children, see Michael Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (London: Faber and Faber, 2002); Douglas Candland,

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Feral Child as Taxonomic Disorder Diana Fuss suggests that the contemporary recession of humanism lends urgency to the question of what it means to be human and, more critically, of how the human comes to mean. For Fuss, “the human” is not a stable category, and she seeks to chart “the cultural, historical, social, and political borders where the human becomes ‘all too,’ and seems to emerge from or slip into other registers: animal, thing, child” and where the “taxonomic disorder between humans and things” challenges traditional notions of the human.7 One such “taxonomic disorder” lies at the heart of the universal taxonomy of natural beings. In the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758), Carl Linnaeus, who had earlier declared both apes and humans anthropomorpha, or man-like, introduced the class Mammal and the order Primate, and the species Homo sapiens, and classified the human as distinct from all other animals. What is less commented on is that he further divided the genus homo, performatively introducing Homo ferus as a figure parallel to Homo sapiens. The feral person throws into disorder the taxonomic status of the human as animale rationale because it shows up the arbitrary and non-essential nature of the ontological and ethical hierarchy between nonhuman and human animals; it displaces rationality as a uniquely and naturally human feature and, inasmuch as the characteristics of feral children are similar to the discursively constructed animality of animals, the evidence of feral children forces a reconsideration of the relation (of presumed equality and substitutability) between the terms “human” and “subject,” and specifically enables a new look at animal subjectivity. The feral child evinces not the loss or absence of humanity as much as the presence of an incommensurable otherness within “the human,” an animality that cannot be appropriated or reduced to familiar oppositional terms. Anxious about persons who were at least as non-human (in their cognitive and sensory capacities and behaviour) as they appeared to be human, Linnaeus isolated feral children from the space of both nonhuman and human animals, suspending them as an anomalous

Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Lucien Malson, Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). 7 Diana Fuss, ed., Human, All Too Human (London: Routledge, 1996), 2.

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and ahistorical category that belonged nowhere.8 This enabled him to disidentify feral children from the human of Homo sapiens—in turn, feral children became available as tropes to discuss and comment upon prevailing socio-political, racial, and cultural anxieties.9 I want to read the feral child as neither prototype of human nor residual animal; both of these readings would render null the radical challenge that it presents to precisely such a politics of appropriation. Rather I want to keep open the questions that feral children raise about the relationship between identity and subjectivity in order to explore how these challenges help us rethink the ethical and material status of nonhuman animals. Stories about feral children, as about animals, most often divulge more about the political and cultural contexts in which they are written and read, and little about the ostensible subjects of the stories themselves. Perhaps, and as in the case of animals, it is less useful to unearth the “reality” of feral children—their ontological or psychological essence—and more productive to decipher the epistemological and ethical projects they are used to articulate. The “Animality” of the Feral Child Among the classic reports of feral children are European cases from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries such as Wild Peter of Hanover and Victor of Aveyron. In 1724, a boy between twelve and fifteen years of age was found wandering in the woods near Hameln. He was “naked, dark-haired, tanned by constant exposure to the sun. Completely silent,

8 Linnaeus’s tactic may be traced partly to his conviction that at least physiologically, there was little distinction between apes and humans: “show me a generic character . . . by which to distinguish between man and ape. . . . I myself most assuredly know of none.” See Raymond Corbey, The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human Boundary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 46. 9 Feral children have historically been used to explore the dominant concerns of a society; for some of the more recent explorations of the famous European feral children, see Newton, Savage Girls, 2002; Kenneth Kidd, Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Richard Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Julia Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Adriana Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).

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he could tell them nothing of himself or of his history.”10 He walked on two legs but could not speak and had to be restrained at first because he constantly sought to escape. At the time of capture, he was eating a bird that he had presumably caught or found, and though he had lived on raw nuts, berries, and vegetables he was gradually trained to eat cooked food. It was estimated that he had lived in isolation for about ten years. He was taken to the court of King George I in Hanover and to London in 1726, where he was put under the charge of the physician John Arbuthnot, a close friend of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, who had him baptised Peter. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels had recently explored the idea that “animals might possess reason, while human beings may be purely irrational” and he was understandably intrigued by this boy who appeared human in form but was “purely irrational.”11 Many of the pamphlets and other propaganda about Peter speculated on the original state of human nature, and Peter’s presence in the royal and most fashionable part of London caused satirical commentary to the effect that “apes could easily be turned into perfect men around town.”12 By 1727, Arbuthnot lost interest in the boy, as did society at large, and Peter was passed on to the care of a farmer who employed him in simple tasks, though always under supervision. He never acquired human language (learning only a few words, imperfectly) and never laughed, but enjoyed listening to music and sang along wordlessly. Once out of the shadow of London, Peter “lived quietly, only growing disturbed at the coming of spring, which delighted him, or at the onset of bad weather, which set him growling, howling and showing great disorder.”13 He died in 1785. Victor of Aveyron, perhaps the most famous of all European feral children, was captured in 1800, running naked in the woods near Lacaune in France. Originally thought to be dark skinned, he was shown to be fair after much washing. He was estimated to be about twelve years old, could not speak, and bore a number of scars, including one across the throat. Although he could run extremely fast—again, on two legs—he would most often sit and rock from side to side, or backwards and forwards. He appeared indifferent to what went on around him and would bite and scratch if threatened. His primary interest lay in 10 11 12 13

Newton, Savage Girls, 27. Ibid., 40. La Mettrie quoted in ibid., 36. Ibid., 52.

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food and when given a mirror, he did not recognise himself but rather looked behind it. Bonaterre, professor of natural history at École Centrale at Aveyron and a friend of Linnaeus, considered him “more like an animal than a man, confined to bestial instinct and purely animal functions, his lower senses of smell and taste being overdeveloped at the expense of the higher, more humane sense of hearing—that sense which emerges from our magnificent invention of language. At first mistakenly thought to be deaf, the boy himself was completely without speech. Sometimes he might let out some cry of anger, murmuring grunt of contentment, or laugh of hilarity.”14 Victor was sent to Paris, where he drew a crowd that, in the wake of the great revolution, was “eager to see what might prove to be a native ‘noble savage,’ a representative of a vanished Eden, perhaps even the symbol of a political renovation.”15 Philippe Pinel, the doctor famous for his innovative approach to treating the insane, declared him an idiot “destitute of affection, unable to feel gratitude, kindness or any attachment to others.”16 A young physician, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, took an interest in the boy and spent a year observing him and teaching him language. Victor became a privileged node in Enlightenment debates about animal-human distinctions, specifically with respect to language acquisition. By 1806, however, when he had published two reports on his experiments with Victor, Itard gave up on him and Victor moved in with Itard’s housekeeper. He died in 1828, not much more able to speak than when he had been found (he knew two words) but trained in basic social etiquette. “Race” and the Feral Child Around the mid-nineteenth century, feral children all but disappear in Europe and begin to be discovered by colonial officials in India and Africa.17 At about this time, through the change in geographical 14 Ibid., 100. Victor’s ability to laugh was unusual; most feral children are noted for being generally expressionless or indifferent. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 101. 17 Insomuch as feral children and Homo ferus were discursive categories, although they also always referred to material beings, their absence (in Europe) or presence (in colonised places) is performative. That is, while individuals who fit the material terms of “feral” or “wild” may have continued to be found in Europe after the mid-nineteenth century, conceptually, the category was transferred to “wild” places. I would argue

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location and the rise of the sciences of anthropology and psychology as specialised sites of knowledge production, the questions raised by feral children also begin to change. Most significantly, unlike Peter, Victor, and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century feral children in Europe, nineteenth-century colonial feral children were almost always associated with animals—and in India, specifically with wolves. Departing from the earlier speculation and wonderment about the nature of individual feral children and the desire to humanise them through education, questions of veracity, native superstition, and uncivilised social practices now become the primary focus of European officials and scholars. The emphasis shifts from what feral children might reveal about the nature of humanity to the documentation, modification, and confirmation, or rejection, of native narratives. Speculations about whether feral children exist in a pure, Edenic state of nature are never asked of the Indian “wolf boys”; instead, colonial officials and storytellers trace the existence of colonial feral children to the barbarism of native familial and social practices. Native feral children’s animality results in administrative measures rather than philosophical speculation, and anxieties about the proximity between the animal and the human become displaced onto and deflected by questions of race. The “animalness” of feral children provides a point of entry for considering the relationship among discourses of animality, animal-human relations, and the material treatment of nonhuman animals. Literary theorist Cary Wolfe says: It is crucial to pay critical attention to the discourse of animality quite irrespective of the issue of how nonhuman animals are treated . . . because the discourse of animality has historically served as a crucial strategy in the oppression of humans by other humans—a strategy whose legitimacy and force depend, however, on the prior taking for granted of the traditional ontological distinction, and consequent ethical divide, between human and nonhuman animals. [. . .] Even though the discourse of animality and species difference may theoretically be applied to an other of whatever

that, following the logic of a temporal (and civilisational) lag between Europe and its colonies, feral children could no longer afford to be found in Europe once they were discursively brought into existence in colonized spaces such as India.

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dipika nath type, the consequences of that discourse, in institutional terms, fall overwhelmingly on nonhuman animals.18

The discursive animalisation and desubjectivation of human populations on the basis of race, culture, or gender rely upon the assumption of “humanness” as a natural and self-evident quality—an assumption that is challenged by the evidence of feral children. Wolfe points out that as long as we allow for an ethical distinction between animals and humans, our critique of the effects of discursive animality on human individuals and groups remains invested in and is ultimately undone by principles of Enlightenment humanism. I want to extend Wolfe’s argument to suggest that discursive animality, serving to desubjectivate certain humans by attributing to them animal characteristics, emerges precisely in relation to ideologies and practices of race, gender, and sexuality, and the discourse of animality situates human beings specifically as raced and gendered subjects. Animals, as exemplars of “nature,” serve as the ontological ground from which assertions of humanity and culture emerge and upon which they are consolidated.19 But even as the material treatment of animals simultaneously enables and realises the effects of discourses of animality, a charge of animality is also always a raced and gendered charge specific to a time and a place. A cultural materialist reading of representations of feral children in colonial contexts allows us to trace the simultaneous workings of ideolo-

18 Cary Wolfe, “Introduction,” Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xx. 19 The use of nature as “the arbiter of morality” worked to mutually imbricate and consolidate both racist and speciesist ideologies and practices. Nancy Stepan states that by the late eighteenth century, “[t]he appeal to nature in deciding what was in reality a moral issue was fatal.” Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982), xiii. Feminist animal studies scholars such as Carol Adams and ecofeminist scholars such as Karen Warren have pointed out the interimplication of gender and species difference in theories of “nature”: in simplified terms, their work shows that women, generally, have been constructed in western traditions as being closer to nature, more bestial, and therefore less human than men—in this equation, both gendered subjects and animals lose moral consideration. See Carol Adams, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (New York: Continuum, 1994); Karen Warren, ed., Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Londa Schiebinger has shown that Linnaeus used theories of gender to locate the human female closer to animals in his universal taxonomy. In the tenth edition of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus used a typically feminine characteristic (the mammae) to denote animal-human continuity and a typically masculine characteristic to denote the human’s distance from other animals. See Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 47–50.

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gies of race, animality, and gender. Colonised natives were constructed as unfit for self-rule—as primitives or children who needed to be helped into modernity through the benevolent despotism and tutelage of European rationality—on the grounds of their pre-civilisational or savage cultures and lifestyles; that is, natives were constructed as animal-like. Insofar as the colonial project was premised on the rhetorical possibility of civilising the native into eventual full humanity—a premise that was riven with self-impossibility—the native had to be nominally human, albeit a degraded or undeveloped one. Natives could be associated with animals and their ostensible animality could serve to establish them as fit for colonial rule only if their unfull humanity was a result of their degraded social, cultural, religious, and intellectual practices. A framework of sameness is revealed to underlie racial heterogeneity. It is the framework provided by a culturally specific humanity as the natural attribute of Homo sapiens that allows natives to be compared to Europeans, although it appears that the natives are being compared to animals. By violating critical ontological distinctions between Europeans, animal-like natives, and nonhuman animals, feral children undermined colonial logics of domination. The fact that the animalness of feral children was a result not of culture, climate, or civilisational maturity—that feral children were similarly animal-like in both Europe and the colonies—eroded colonial theories of race and evolution, which ascribed a full humanity to Europeans and degraded or immature versions of this humanity to non-Europeans. Historian Hayden White suggests that “culturally self-authenticating devices” such as wildness do not refer to a specific thing or place but rather to an “attitude governing a relationship between a lived reality and some area of problematical existence that cannot be accommodated easily to conventional conceptions of the normal or familiar.”20 While discourses of wildness, bestiality, and animality had long been used to explain (or, more rightly, create) racial, gendered, and class-based differences, feral children’s cognitive and behavioural status appeared to place them ontologically closer to nonhuman animals than bestialised or animalised humans. Unlike racialised and gendered populations, who were animal-like or closer to animals because they had degraded 20

Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximillian Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 4.

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culture or heathen beliefs, feral children did not have any culture and beliefs—like animals, they appeared to live by instinct.21 Yet, they were human in form. As Kenneth Kidd shows, wildness in the accounts of feral children had a national and ethnic as well as a historical and scientific lineage,22 and Julia Douthwaite’s work shows that contemporary preoccupation with “perplexing questions about mankind’s original state [and] the mind’s independence from the body” as well as “period beliefs about mankind’s difference from the beast and the means that might be used to civilize the uncivilized” were brought to bear upon the European feral children.23 While some of the same concerns were present in the treatment of feral children in colonised places, the latter were considered less as scientific objects and more as evidence of native barbarity and ignorance—native feral children were embedded in culture to the same extent that European feral children were removed from it. If European feral children approximated the racialised uncivilised, what did the native feral children signify? Due to increasing knowledge about both other “races” and cultures and about apes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European feral children were often implicitly if not outright compared to both apes and the “lower” races. The case of Memmie Le Blanc (1731) is instructive here.24 However, the association between non-Europeans and animals, especially apes, had a longer history in European thought. Nancy Stepan points out, “Most tragically, too, the African was compared with the great apes which came out of Africa, and which the Europeans encountered at the same time they met the Negro [in the sixteenth century].”25 This concurrence did not bode well for the African human, who came to be associated with the ape, an association that was dangerous for

21 While cognitive ethology and other animal observation in the later twentieth century has shown us that various animal species have distinct and complex social, cultural, and familial practices, animals were considered to lack all sociality and culture in the nineteenth century. This is precisely why it was possible to characterise feral children’s behaviour and demeanour as generically animal-like. A charge of animality against feral children necessarily begs the question: Which animal, and where? The question was escaped only because animality was in the main nothing but an absence of humanity, as it was for Rousseau. 22 See Kidd, Making American Boys. 23 Douthwaite Wild Girl, Natural Man, 1, 2. 24 See Douthwaite, Wild Girl, Natural Man and Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children, 29–53. 25 Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science, 8.

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the African human because of the prior material status of the ape. That is, species logic underwrote and enabled race logic, and preconceived notions of the human served to distance both African ape and human populations from the European. Although it appeared that African humans were being compared to African apes, they were actually being compared to Europeans via the apes. It is critical for our purposes to note what happens to apes in this equation; if animality was the charge that the African had to be defended against, animals themselves necessarily had to be sacrificed in order to salvage the African human because the terms of the debate had set up “animal” as necessarily non-subject. The animality of feral children therefore predictably brought to mind non-Europeans as well as animals. However, native feral children could not be like the uncivilised; they were the uncivilised, and yet they were something more (or less), too. If native feral children were thus doubly marked, what could they divulge about humanity’s original state? Where were the lines to be drawn to separate Europeans from animal-like natives, and feral children from animals? Like animals, feral children are harnessed to specific cultural projects; one such is Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli tales. Effectively eliminating all traces of the animality that threatened the nature of humanity as well as all traces of the native humanity that resisted colonial practices, Kipling produced the ideal native of colonial desire. Feral Stories in Colonial India In November 1892, Kipling wrote to the editor of an American children’s magazine informing her of Mowgli’s existence—“He was a wolf-boy (we have them in India) but being caught early was civilized.”26 Although Mowgli is a popular cross-cultural icon and although his story apparently translates across cultures, times, and languages with ease, it inevitably transmits an understanding of the workings of race, animality, and colonial power. There is little doubt that Kipling was familiar with tales of animal-reared feral children in India. Through his father’s Beast and Man in India, he was probably familiar with nineteenth-century documented cases, and he had read mythical accounts of them in the Buddhist Jataka Tales. He had most probably also read about them in

26

Quoted in Newton Savage Girls, 189.

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such accounts as Robert A. Sterndale’s 1884 Natural History of the Mammalia in India and Ceylon (he took the setting for The Jungle Books from Sterndale’s 1877 “Seonee, or Camp Life on the Satpura Range”), and it is evident from the details in the Mowgli stories that he was familiar with William Sleeman’s anonymously published 1852 pamphlet “An Account of Wolves Nurturing Children in their Dens.”27 Although clearly inspired by Anglo-Indian accounts of wolf boys, Kipling also drew upon the mythical figures of European folklore in crafting Mowgli. However, Don Randall’s claim that Kipling’s interest in feral children is mythical, not sociological or anthropological is undermined by Kipling’s reliance upon documented cases of feral children in India for elaborating on Mowgli’s physical and behavioural characteristics.28 The Mowgli stories were written in the wake of both the Indian rebellion of 1857 and Darwin’s work on evolution; far from being a harmless fable, Kipling’s story attempts to invoke the India that he nostalgically called home, one in which hierarchies of race and species operate as natural laws even as they are reformulated to account for political and scientific exigencies. An India in which boundary confusions—between animals and humans, and native and coloniser—leads not to a rethinking of the bounds of race and species but to a reformed logic of domination.

27 Although the distinction of providing the first published scholarly discussion of Indian wolf children in the west goes to Murchison and Egerton (who heard of the accounts from the British colonial official William Sleeman), Sleeman’s account ought rightfully to be considered the original and premier colonial source on Indian wolf children. See Robert Murchison and F. Egerton, “On Wolves Suckling Children,” Annals and Magazine of Natural History 8, no. 44, 2nd series (August 1851): 153–54; William Sleeman, “An Account of Wolves Nurturing Children in Their Dens,” The Zoologist 14, third series (1888): 87–98. 28 For instance, readers of “In the Rukh,” chronologically the first Mowgli story, discover that animal-reared feral children have hardened elbows and knees, which is evidence of their having gone on all fours. This detail is directly taken from Sleeman’s pamphlet. In arguing for the mythical quality of the stories, Randall claims that The Jungle Books offer an “allegorical, empire-affirming restaging of the history of British India, a restaging that is ordered upon yet unsettled by its inscription of the Mutiny crisis.” Don Randall, “Post-Mutiny Allegories of Empire in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40, no. 1 (1998): 98. While this is an insightful reading, “the history of British India” that it restages includes the widespread killing of animals for both ideological and mercenary imperial gain; to lose sight of material nonhuman animals as they are turned into tropes would be to tell only a part of this history. As Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert point out, “it is also vital to give credence to the practices that are folded into the making of representations, and . . . to ask how animals themselves may figure in these practices. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, eds, Animal Spaces, Beastly Places (London: Routledge, 2000), 5.

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Indian wolf boys captured and examined by colonial officials in the second half of the nineteenth century prefigure Mowgli by half a century.29 While myths of animal-reared feral children and other tales of transspecies traffic were considered cultural origin stories that belonged to the distant past of Europe, feral children discovered in colonised lands from the mid-nineteenth century on were read not as historical or cultural anomalies but as belonging to and embedded in the social and cultural milieus of the places in question. By the telos of civilisation that posited a time lag between European modernity and its colonies, feral children of the distant European past belonged to the colonised present of the still wild places of India and Africa, and there is seldom the note of wonder at their existence here that invariably accompanied eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European cases.30 The incredulity in these instances is directed towards native people’s responses to such phenomena. Unlike cases of feral children in Europe, reports of animal-reared feral children in India drew upon discourses of native culture and lifestyles and, in implicating native familial, social, and cultural practices in the animality of the feral children, appeared to bolster the logic of colonial domination. Native inability to manage the domestic sphere was a further indication of their unsuitability for self-rule. In documenting cases of feral children in India, Sleeman had speculated on the reason for the great number of such individuals in India—a speculation that immediately became established as truth not least because of Sleeman’s authority. He had pointed to greed and a love of ostentatious display, as well as less diligent parenting and a concomitant lack of civilised familial life more generally among the natives, as the real reason that wolves carried away native children—a phenomenon clearly avoidable, in Sleeman’s view, and thus an indisputable sign of native degeneracy and barbarism. Here was clear evidence that left to themselves, the natives were liable to degenerate into or be wiped out by animals. Not only was the existence of feral children itself demonstrative of native incapacity for self-rule, to make matters worse, native response to feral children removed any doubt of the need for colonial domination. Rather than 29

Sleeman’s 1852, “An Account of Wolves.” I draw upon Ajay Skaria’s account of the colonial logic of temporality. Ajay Skaria, “Shades of Wildness: Tribe, Caste, and Gender in Western India,” The Journal of Asian Studies 56, no. 3 (1997): 726–45. 30

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conduct a wholesale slaughter of child-stealing animals, the natives appeared to accept child stealing by wolves with a degree of equanimity or resignation that baffled the European mind.31 Like the feral child, or children more generally, natives may resist the civilising/humanising process (including the killing of animals), but this in itself could be no argument against the virtues of civilisation. In some ways, there was little difference in the European mind between (uneducated, rural) natives, especially the hill- and forest-dwelling tribes, and native feral children—both had habits and manners that appeared equally barbaric and self-destructive. However, feral children also disrupted the animalisation of native populations; where the natives were superstitious and cowardly, at least they had sociality and beliefs, no matter how degraded. Feral children on the other hand indicated not the presence of wrong beliefs but the absence of the notion and practice of believing itself. The challenge in dealing with feral children lay not in supplanting primitive ideas with modern ones but in imposing upon them ideation itself. Ruling over the Rukh “In the Rukh,” published in 1893, a year before the first of The Jungle Books, presents a full-grown Mowgli who rules over the forest with all the nonchalance of a “Greek god.”32 This is how Gisborne, a British forest officer in the Department of Woods and Forests with the Indian Government, first encounters him. We learn that the Department of Woods and Forests treats the forests as reserves—restricting access to domestic animal and human populations, except in times of drought when the starving cattle and farmers are permitted to use the forests they have held customary and usage rights, though not private ownership, over for millennia. Officers of the department “calculate the profit of their plantations to five points of decimals; they are the doctors and midwives of the huge teak forests of Upper Burma, the rubber of the Eastern Jungles, and the gall-nuts of the South.”33 The forest officer 31 The English had exterminated wolves on their island as early as 1500 and considered domination over nature—which necessitated the extermination of animals, particularly large predators—a sign of civilisational progress. 32 Rudyard Kipling, “In the Rukh,” The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling: Many Inventions (Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1941), 292. 33 Ibid., 270.

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must “know the people and the polity of the jungle; meeting tiger, bear, leopard, wild-dog, and all the deer.”34 He is “the friend of newly planted trees, the associate of uncouth rangers and hairy trackers.”35 These few lines establish the extent and detail of British control of Indian forests—a prime resource in their quest to better manage the subcontinent and extract resources from it most efficiently—and this includes control over various indigenous creatures, including tigers, wild-dogs, and “hairy trackers.” Gisborne needs to know the habits and habitation of the polity if he is to exercise control over them, and the forests are first and foremost to be protected from these natives—animal and human—if they are to be profitable to the colonial government.36 Mowgli is eminently well placed to serve as Gisborne’s deputy; not only is he intimately familiar with the ways of the forest and its inhabitants, he also has at his command the four wolves of his childhood who serve as his deputies. And we discover that what Gisborne considers Mowgli’s magic (his knowledge of and ability to manipulate the forest and its animal populations) is really the labour performed by his wolf brothers. The story gestures towards the Mowgli stories in The Jungle Books, yet to be published, in which we learn precisely how Mowgli’s intimate knowledge of and control over the forest is established. Mowgli’s animality is a result of his upbringing by and among animals, and it is this very animality that renders him suitable for the imperial task of supervising the use of the forest by native animal and human inhabitants. Mowgli’s animality is diametrically opposed to the disturbing animality of feral children. Feral children’s affinity towards and desire for other animals caused much anxiety among their observers, so much so that, very often, the animal associates of feral children were killed in the quest to humanise the feral children and discourage

34

Ibid. Ibid., 271. 36 Examining the relationship between race and resource extraction in colonial India, Kavita Philip says, “Natural history, anthropology, and forestry were intimately linked not only to each other but with global political economy and colonial state policy. [. . .] Commercially motivated enterprises such as the cultivation of cinchona and the establishment of rubber, coffee, and tea plantations drew their legitimation not only from a contemporary environmentalist discourse but also from a ‘scientifi c’ model of society’s progression from the hunter-gathering, through shifting cultivation and settled agriculture, to the settled urban stage.” Kavita Philip, Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 23. 35

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animal-human intimacy.37 Feral children’s attachment to nonhuman animals was both the cause and the symptom of their non-attachment to humans. Like Mowgli, they preferred the company of animals to that of (native) humans, but unlike Mowgli, their affinity was not arranged along an ethical or ontological hierarchy. One of the most unsettling aspects of feral children’s particularity, evident in all recorded cases—particularly in those feral children who were found in complete isolation from humans, with or without animal company—is their lack of self-identification as human, in fact, a lack of identification per se, and a lack of species preference for and loyalty towards human beings. More than anything else, this “non-humanity” places them beyond the reach of instruction and power.38 Kipling, however, establishes Mowgli as indisputably human, initially on the basis of physiological characteristics and an innate psychological dominance evident in his inexplicable ability to outstare all other animals and later through self-identification—he is thus eminently suited to the workings of colonial power. Most saliently, Mowgli initially self-identifies as a wolf that is, he is really a human identifying as a wolf ), gradually and unwillingly acknowledging that he is human and that, eventually, man must return to man. The native Mowgli’s preference for the company of the white man and of animals excludes ordinary natives from the story altogether, except as caricatures. What is significant for my purposes is not whether Mowgli is really wolf or not, or whether he is a half-lupine/ half-human hybrid; rather more interesting is Kipling’s naturalisation of oppositional and exclusive identity. In this case, hybridity, usually a cause of colonial concern about degradation, is the result of a mixing that removes rather than adds corrupting elements. Mowgli’s hybridity points towards a curious fracture in colonial understandings of animality. Precisely the “animalising” or bestial tendencies in native humans—superstition, cowardice, materialism, and excessive sociality—are removed through Mowgli’s superior animality; a “pure” animality is substituted for the inappropriate one of native

37 Sleeman’s brief account of six wolf boys contains stark evidence of this anxiety. See Sleeman, “An Account of Wolves,” 90. 38 I use a Foucauldian understanding of power to suggest that power, unlike domination, requires the cooperation of those upon whom it acts. Because of its capacity to be internalised, it saturates the field of action such that even resistance to power operates within this field. In fact, power needs resistance in order to raise itself over simple domination by physical force. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 92–97.

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bestiality. Thus, the story offers shades of animality and humanity rather than a simple dichotomy between “animal” and “human.” Although colonial logics are often depicted as deploying a dichotomous understanding on nature-culture, native-coloniser, this refraction of animality is entirely consistent with colonial animal logic. Mahesh Rangarajan has shown, for instance, that the English distinguished not so much between “wild” and “domesticated” animals as between wild animals that needed to be protected and those that ought to be exterminated, and they imported this logic to their colonies.39 Wolfe, too, argues that rather than forming a simple animal-human binary, animals and humans move between four categories stretched along a continuum. At one end are animalised animals and at the other humanised humans, and between these two poles fall humanised animals and animalised humans.40 While this model is preferable to binaries, I suggest that feral children violate the protocols of even this posthumanist grid by turning the continuum into a cat’s cradle. Mowgli’s non-subversive transgression of animal-human boundaries undoes the threat of species blurring presented by feral children and allows Kipling to deploy Mowgli’s mythical yet (or perhaps therefore) natural animality in the service of the empire. The famous Baconian aphorism, “Human knowledge and human power meet in one,” is distinctly at work in this story. Like Gisborne, Mowgli, too, uses his intimate knowledge of local populations—in his case, the animal populations of the forest who collectively raised him from infancy—in order to exercise power over them in the service of the government. As Chinua Achebe points out, a colonial official’s claim that he knows his natives means two things; one, it suggests that the natives are simple and easily knowable and, two, that understanding and controlling go

39 See Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860–1914 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 144. 40 Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 174–75. Following Donna Haraway’s work, Wolfe is referring specifically to the contemporary technoscientific moment of eroded identities, but while the duplicity of binary formations may have become stark in recent times, evidence of their inadequacy goes much further back in history.

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hand in hand—“understanding being a precondition for control and control constituting adequate proof of understanding.”41 Gisborne had been in the forest for four years before he met Mowgli. By then, after he had first “loved it without comprehension” and then hated it fervently, “The forests took him back again, and he was content to serve them, to deepen and widen his fire-lines . . . . On some still day that grass would be burned off, and a hundred beasts that had their homes there would rush out before the pale flames at high noon. Later, the forest would creep forward . . . in orderly lines of saplings, and Gisborne, watching, would be well pleased.”42 This is the duty of the forest officer—to bring order to the jungles and profit to the government. And it is equally Gisborne’s duty to bring order to Mowgli’s unruliness and put it to colonial service. In this work there is room for both utilitarian treatment of and Romantic attitudes towards the forests and its denizens—in fact, as Kavita Philip shows, the two were not antagonistic or contradictory forces but rather mutually supportive and constitutive.43 Ajay Skaria points out that as part of the ideology of the “rational” use of natural resources and “the articulation of a Cartesian scientificity” in colonial forestry, “an almost geometrical order was imposed on forests, and they were converted into industrial resources that had to be rationally utilized.”44 Philip, too, speaks of colonial forestry principles and practices: “State control of forest and water resources ultimately led to a rationalization of land use in accordance with the changes in the nineteenth-century global political economy. [. . .] In this discourse, however, the commercial and imperial motives for conservation often took precedence over the customary rights of local users. Forest laws in Indian and African colonies invariably dispossessed tribals and subsistence peasants of their rights to the land. Local methods of resource use [. . .] were subordinated to metropolitan demands on the land.”45 All this required, of course, that “a hundred beasts” be driven from their homes; in “In the Rukh” and other Mowgli stories, the killing of animals, for sport, study, or management, which alone convinced 41 Chinua Achebe, “Colonialist Criticism,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), 58. 42 Kipling, “In the Rukh,” 271. 43 Philip, Civilizing Natures, 7–8. 44 Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers, and Wildness in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 199. 45 Philip, Civilizing Natures, 21.

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many an Englishman to take up service in India, ensures the wellbeing of both local animals and humans, and incidentally brings profit to the colonial government.46 The complementarity of utilitarian and Romantic discourses finds a parallel in Mowgli’s natural yet colonised humanity. By distancing him from all human association, Kipling serves Mowgli up as a “natural” human whose instinct towards forests and animals can be trusted implicitly because it is not driven by a desire for personal gain. Where Mowgli’s “natural” (wild, non-material) instinct about forest management and control meets colonial forest management practices we see the collapse of the Romantic and the utilitarian approach to colonial resource extraction. Similarly, Gisborne’s utilitarian role as harbinger of order and modernity and his Romantic role as protector of forests ultimately yield the same result. They both require establishing a control over forests that is simultaneously scientific (knowing the properties of the soil, for instance) aesthetically pleasing to the colonial eye (orderly lines of saplings), and profitable to the colonial purse (teak, rubber, and gall nuts instead of subsistence vegetation). The orderliness of commercially profitable vegetation that is untouched by native animals and humans is satisfactory to Gisborne’s scientific, aesthetic, and administrative sensibilities.47 Into Gisborne’s solitary life bursts Mowgli with his knowledge of the forest and its wild animals, his scorn for conventional village life, and a desire to please Gisborne, whom he addresses as “Sahib” from the moment they first meet. Unlike feral children in India and elsewhere,

46 Skaria, “Shades of Wildness” and Hybrid Histories, and Philip, Civilizing Natures, also discuss the construction of “wildness” as both a resource and a threat; this dual character required that forest officers be highly skilled in both the natural and the human sciences in order to impose order over and extract profits from natural resources. Certain forms of wildness could not simply be exterminated; they had rather to be domesticated, yet remain wild enough to be profitable. In this view, the resource and threat that Mowgli represents is perfectly managed by Gisborne; Mowgli loses none of his natural skills as he becomes loyally attached to Gisborne and his colonial forestry methods and logics. 47 This is not to suggest that native colonial and pre-colonial attitudes towards “nature” were unmixed or homogeneous. Native populations had myriad conceptions of and practices towards forests and wild animals. A mixture of scientific, religious, and utilitarian responses was to be found in their worldviews, too. But, as Rangarajan shows, an ethic of co-existence with wild animals was widespread in India, for both technological and cultural reasons. See Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest, 138–97, and “The Raj and the Natural World: The War against ‘Dangerous Beasts’ in Colonial India,” in Wildlife in Asia: Cultural Perspectives, ed. John Knight (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004).

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Mowgli has human language, walks on two legs, and knows not only that he is human and superior to animals but also that Gisborne is British and superior to him. Further, Mowgli’s acknowledgement of Gisborne’s superiority lacks both envy and indifference, and this makes him the ideal imperial subject. Because his animal/human (or humanimal) nature is unsullied by base or native humanity, Mowgli can be relied upon to serve the forests by serving Gisborne without hope for personal gain.48 Mowgli seems to have, and be, the best of both animal and human worlds—he has all the advantages of being a rational human being with none of the meaner proclivities of the native. His distance from native humans in conjunction with his romanticised animality serves to establish him in Gisborne’s eyes as properly and desirably human. The hierarchy is transparent: Mowgli knows and controls the forests and its animal populations because he is an exceptional and a proper native (that is, because he is unlike real natives—it may in fact be more appropriate to call him an improper native), and Gisborne knows and controls Mowgli because he is an exceptional and proper British forest officer.49 In these negotiations, animal populations serve as the primary object of control, and Mowgli’s animality not only does not disrupt animalhuman hierarchies, it serves precisely to reinforce them. Mowgli’s control over the forest, a result of his animality, is critical to Gisborne’s power over the region as a whole; in the late nineteenth century, with Darwinian theories of evolution already widely accepted, a judicious mixing of animal and human is better suited to imperial purposes than simple animal-human dichotomies. Mowgli has all the virtues of animals (heightened senses, a knowledge of forest rhythms, and wolf leadership) but he has not succumbed to animality to such a degree that he does not recognise the desirability of killing those animals that threatened the management of forests and resource extraction and were consequently labelled vermin, such as tigers. As the reader will learn from his antagonistic relationship with Shere Khan in The Jungle

48 I borrow the term “humanimal” from Charles Minahen, “Humanimals and Anihumans in Gary Larson’s Gallery of the Absurd,” in Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, ed. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (New York: Routledge, 1997). 49 In keeping with his desire for cross-racial fraternity, Kipling creates a forest officer who is clearly a cut above the norm. Gisborne truly loves the forest, does not hunt indiscriminately, and is kind (yet firm—that is, benevolently despotic) towards the native humans.

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Books, Mowgli hates all tigers. Mowgli’s animosity towards tigers is particularly curious because he is himself fashioned after the tiger in some ways. By the end of the nineteenth century, the earlier wholesale colonial war against tigers was beginning to be tempered by feelings of mercy and the need to protect these majestic predators. Rather than categorising all tigers as vermin, there was a move towards killing only man-eaters but not tigers who knew their place—that is, tigers who left cattle and humans alone. A tiger who knew its place was a desirable tiger and possibly allowed to live, and the native who knew his place—Mowgli—was a desirable native and could be put to the service of the government.50 It is significant that Gisborne meets Mowgli for the first time just as he is about to set off on the trail of the Red One, a tiger who has killed a forest ranger. Mowgli appears out of nowhere “naked except for the loin-cloth, but crowned with a wreath of the tasselled blossoms of the white convolvulus-creeper. [. . .] His voice was clear and bell-like, utterly different from the usual whine of the native, and his face as he lifted it in the sunshine might have been that of an angel strayed among the woods.”51 When asked about his origins, Mowgli tells Gisborne that he is “a man without caste, and for matter of that without a father.”52 The negative double self-identification establishes Mowgli as a man whose animal upbringing saved him from turning into a whiny and treacherous native. A “pure” animality comes to the rescue of a “corrupted” humanity, complicating a simple animal-human dichotomy. When Gisborne informs Mowgli that he is the “warden of this rukh,” Mowgli exclaims, “How?” Do they number the trees and blades of grass here?”53 Upon Gisborne’s insistence that such classification and tabulation is necessary to protect the forests from “such gypsy fellows as thou,” Mowgli protests, “I! I would not hurt the jungle for any gift. That is my home.”54 Although there is a trace of sarcasm in Mowgli’s

50 See Rangarajan, “The Raj and the Natural World” for an exploration of colonial and native attitudes towards tigers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He points out, for instance, the colonial tendency to draw parallels between “dangerous” beasts and human outlaws (such as the Thugs that Sleeman sought to apprehend and, in the wake of the 1857–58 rebellion, those natives who resisted colonial rule) and to employ or consider employing similar measures against both. 51 Kipling, “In the Rukh,” 273–74. 52 Ibid., 274. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 275.

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questions about colonial forest management practices, it is mingled with wonder that trees and blades of grass may be scientifically numbered and studied, and he accepts Gisborne’s justification of forest regulation by distancing himself from those “gypsy fellows,” that is, regular natives, who would harm the forest, that is, harm colonial profits for the sake of subsistence. From the moment that Mowgli leads Gisborne quickly and unerringly to where the man-eating tiger is resting after its meal and Gisborne puts a bullet in the tiger’s head while Mowgli looks on approvingly, he is Gisborne’s self-appointed protector and deputy; Mowgli helps Gisborne manage the forest through his knowledge of the animals and their activities and protects him from the treacherous natives. At the time of the first meeting, Mowgli also offers to carry Gisborne’s gun. The image then is of the colonial shikari out on a hunt with a native servant, and this hunt is unlike larger ostentatious colonial hunting expeditions in that it is less for pleasure or prestige and more a forest officer’s duty. As Gisborne puts it, “It is only travellers and now and then young soldiers who are known to the world as great hunters. The Forest Officers take their shikar as part of the day’s work, and no one hears of it.”55 However, it is like the more famous colonial hunting narratives in that it is a means of displaying colonial control while exterminating “vermin.” In his work on the relationship between European imperialism and hunting in Africa and India, John MacKenzie points out, “In many areas of the world . . . the animal resource contributed to the expansionist urge.”56 MacKenzie shows that whatever its specific contours and techniques, European control over various animal populations as well as over the representation of animals and animality in colonised places was critical to the imperial project of establishing economic and racial dominance over non-European lands and peoples. Animals subsidised a dangerous imperialist endeavour—they served as valuable material resource and, in the case of hunting tigers in particular, the killing of animals was also a spectacular display of colonial domination. Unlike the servants usually employed by shikaris, whose loyalty could only be counted on so far, especially after the 1857 rebellion, and whose courage in the face of wild animals could be counted on

55

Ibid., 272. John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 7. 56

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not at all, Mowgli is the perfect companion.57 He is willing to perform the labour of a self-sacrificing servant without the threat of treachery because he has not learnt such human traits as rebellion and greed; his selfless interest lies in the forest, and his “natural” understanding of what is good for the forest coincides with Gisborne’s. And, unlike the natives, Mowgli is not afraid of wild animals because he knows enough of their ways to predict and control their movements. Thus, in this story, colonial techniques regulating the use of forests, the treatment of native animals and humans, and the extraction of natural resources stem from principles of modern forest management that are rendered natural and universal by being endorsed by Mowgli’s “natural” scientificity. Animal, Native, Human If human and European dominance are a result not of calculated imperial strategies but of the workings of natural law that all creatures are universally subject to, European dominance over the colonised as well as human dominance over animals can brook no objections. “In the Rukh” is eventually a nostalgic tale in which Kipling brings an idealised and mythical past into the present in the form of Mowgli, the wolf boy. A bestial past that welcomes and naturally yields to the present modernity of imperial rule serves to erase or overwrite the violent history of colonial domination and its effects on both animal and human populations.58 It seems remarkable that Kipling picked the animalised

57 Native hunters, who hunted not for leisure but subsistence, were characterised not only as cowards and unsportsmanlike but as undeserving of the privilege of hunting. After 1857–58, native populations were also disarmed, which further consolidated colonial hunting privileges. See Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature, and Rangarajan, “The Raj and the Natural World.” Satya Mohanty also traces the difference between native apprehension of nature and colonial management practices: The native’s “feeling for nature was of a different quality from that of the colonist.” For the natives, who did not have a western relationship with culture, “hunting must have been the locus of a complex variety of experiences common to which would be a recognition that humans are dependent on nature.” Mowgli’s “hunterlike discipline . . . is a Western and colonialist art. It . . . brings to mind the long history of colonial myths of the (white) hunter who must learn from the natives in order to defeat and rule them” See Satya Mohanty, “Drawing the Color Line: Kipling and the Culture of Colonial Rule,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick LaCapra (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 332, 331. 58 Patrick Brantlinger has talked about the rise of “extinction discourse” in the nineteenth century. By the logic of this evolutionary discourse, the native races of such colonised places as Australia and Africa were naturally doomed to extinction,

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feral child to figure a humanity that was comforting and familiar to Europeans. Or, perhaps, the figure is comforting precisely because it is not familiar; it could be argued that by introducing a magical, mythical element, Kipling assuaged otherwise dominant anxieties about race and power. If the natives were treacherous and appeared to resent the benefits of colonial rule, Mowgli was evidence that this was only due to their debased natures, not bad faith on the part of the colonisers. Randall claims that although Kipling never directly wrote “a Mutiny tale,” The Jungle Books record Kipling’s response to this momentous event in Indian colonial history that was to haunt the British literary and sociological imagination for decades after. Invoking “the Indian Rebellion of 1857 as the ‘absent text’ of Kipling’s jungle fictions,” Randall attempts to show how “the history informs the fictions and how the fictions reconstrue and reshape the history.”59 By this reading, Kipling is claiming that if all natives had been like the brave, casteless, and subservient subject-agent Mowgli—natural native human beings rather than superstitious and treacherous Hindus and Muslims ready to riot over rumours of animal fat—the rebellion would never have taken place, because everyone, ruler and ruled, would have agreed upon principles of civilisational progress, secular science, the suitability and desirability of British imperial rule, and rational colonial management. Of course, Mowgli is not really casteless; both the craftsman skills of his human woodcutter father and generic human physiological talents such as the human use of hands are present in his blood as “natural” traits. Kipling is able to suggest Mowgli’s distance from the ills of caste and religion by giving him an animal family. Using the trope of the animal-reared feral child to invoke humanity’s past as well as its idealised future, Kipling harks to an older reading of feral children. To the Europeans who first encountered such individuals, these uneducated creatures denoted simultaneously humanity’s prior condition as well as a threat to its potential future if the savagery of humanity’s past was not conquered by the present and brought into modernity.

and although European influence in the form of disease or wars may have contributed to the phenomenon, the “natural” extinction of the people, as a lower biological form naturally gave way to a higher, was inevitable and not of European making. See Patrick Brantlinger, “Introduction,” Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 59 Randall, “Post-Mutiny Allegories,” 98.

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In order for Mowgli to be different from both animals and native humans, it is critical that he is simultaneously paternalistic (and appropriately violent) towards them and subordinate to Gisborne. Without this dual identity of dominance over animals and subservience to the white man, Mowgli might still denote humanity’s past but not its potentially civilised (though still racialised) future. In treating animals as merely allegorical figures, however, such a reading fails to account for the historical and material relations between animals and humans in nineteenth-century colonial India. It fails to account for the fact that the scientific, administrative, racial, and gendered discourses that first demonised the tiger as vermin and, later, a worthy adversary to be overcome in fair battle, brought tigers to the brink of extinction. It fails to attend to the monumental increase in tiger, wolf, snake, and other animal deaths following the colonial decision to offer a bounty for the death of every animal in these categories. It also fails to acknowledge those relations between indigenous animal and human populations that did not always fall along the animal-human dichotomy that the tale seeks to naturalise and reinforce. While allegorical animal tales are the staple of children’s fiction, they are also always a product of and a commentary upon contemporary times. To ignore the material presence of the feral child around whom the story revolves as well as the nonhuman animals in the tale would be especially ironic given that it is specifically the interplay between different kinds of animality and the specific animality of the feral child that makes this story unique among both Kipling’s work and the genre of children’s stories more generally. Rather than (or in addition to) anthropomorphic animals, here we have a zoomorphic human. Whereas animals are endlessly dressed up as humans, it is rare to find a tale that in which a human dresses up, at least superficially, as animal—particularly when the human in question is a feral child. The fact that Kipling does not allow Mowgli to be feral in ontological, cognitive, or epistemological terms does not entirely undo the history that perforce accompanies feral children. Kipling may give Mowgli human traits and attempt to pass the tale off as simply another children’s story, but a single glance at the historical record of feral children disabuses us of any notion that the human sits comfortably in its isolated self-identification. The very fact that Kipling is at such pains to invert the feral child into its antithesis alerts the reader to the feral disorderliness that threatens to undo faith in a “natural” humanity.

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In fantasising the feral child, Kipling displaces its challenge to notions of human subjectivity onto questions of race, gender, and sexuality. Far from “becoming-animal,” Mowgli’s animal association renders him superhuman or, more strictly, supernative; not only is he endowed with animal virtues and capacities, it is precisely these animal qualities that allow him to be human. An appropriate animality serves to create a properly colonised humanity—far superior to ordinary native humanity but decidedly and permanently inferior to white humanity. Kipling’s desire for cross-racial fraternity, his (historically appropriate) love of animals, and his belief in the “natural” racial superiority of the white man coexist comfortably in this story because anxieties about each are effectively displaced onto the others such that, eventually, it is hard to separate them. Kipling performs a few related sleights of hand in the Mowgli stories; although Mowgli is supposed to be removed from all human influence and contrary to the evidence in every single recorded instance of feral children he is established as ontologically and ethically human from the very beginning of The Jungle Books. Mowgli sheds the prejudices of the natives by being reared in the jungle but he does not cease to be native, although he is the very best human that a native can be—intelligent, brave, loyal—because he is a wolf boy and therefore natural. This humanity is also established in contrast to the animality of the other animals in the jungle; Mowgli’s animality is not only different from the animality of the other animals, but it is also precisely non-animality and exactly the content of his humanity. Thus, instead of attempting to discover Mowgli’s humanity (which is the usually failed or at best semisuccessful project of most observers of feral children), Kipling presumes it. Strictly speaking, it is not animality (as nonhuman animalness) but a proper native colonised humanity—which is Mowgli’s natural state and which is able to emerge because of the absence of native humanness—that makes Mowgli human. Non-native humanness is proper humanness. This is an insight long afforded by postcolonial theory; what is noteworthy is the relation between race, colonialism, animality, and material animals that is highlighted in this instance. Both “In the Rukh” and The Jungle Books contain references to historical instances of feral children but none of these other feral children achieves the status that Mowgli does—in fact, we are informed that feral children usually die in childhood.60 Mowgli’s human individuality, fashioning his animality 60

Kipling, “In the Rukh,” 291–94.

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into a uniquely non-native humanity, is pre-discursive and precedes his experiences. Nandini Batra has claimed that the movement in the Mowgli stories “is construed as always being upwards, towards a higher order, from breast to Man, from anarchy to order, from ‘superstition’ to science.”61 Contrary to Batra’s reading, which relies on a progressive animal-human continuum, Kipling may be telling a tale of evolutionary progress through zoological retrogression; the degraded humanity of the native must be undone by going “down” to “pure” animal if “real” humanity is to be achieved. Further, Kipling depoliticises this humanity, and in consequence, humanity in general, by rendering it natural; having depoliticised it, he is able to fashion Mowgli’s “natural” and ideal humanity along racialised and gendered terms. That is, if Mowgli’s humanity is a natural one, his knowledge, opinions, and prejudices must also be natural and not the result of colonial racial politics. Postcolonial scholars have critiqued the deployment of Mowgli’s knowledge of jungle ways towards the efficient management of and control over the subcontinent; in this regard, scholars such as Satya Mohanty have often drawn parallels between Mowgli and Kipling’s other famous child hero Kim.62 There is, however, a further layer to Kipling’s subterfuge, which lies in the fashioning of Mowgli’s animality-as-humanity. In drawing on and subverting the recorded instances of wolf boys in India, Kipling not only creates a mythical space for the safe and even welcome practice of colonial power, he deflects the feral child’s challenge to species belonging onto questions of race and thereby displaces the question of the relationship between animals and humans, brought to the fore by feral children, onto the question of a naturally hierarchised humanity.

61 Nandini Batra, “Jungle People and Beast Folk: Darwinian and Imperial Discourse in Two Fables of the Fin-de-Siècle,” Bestia VIII (2001/2002): 170. 62 Mohanty, “Drawing the Color Line.”

AT THE TOP OF THE HIERARCHICAL LADDER: WEREANIMALS IN ANNETTE CURTIS KLAUSE’S BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE AND PATRICE KINDL’S OWL IN LOVE Cat Yampell Literature can endorse prevailing ideologies; it can, of course, also subvert them and propose alternatives. Fantasy, specifically Magic Realism, creates opportunities for questioning and overturning normative structures while simultaneously positing possibilities and potentialities. Rosemary Jackson claims, “The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent.’”1 By inviting the magical to enter the mundane, authors cloak subversive messages under elements of normalcy and attempt to stimulate readers to question their basic understanding of the world and its limitations. Magic enables a perception of agency, and therefore freedom, through a standpoint outside of and counter to the normative social order, an interrogation and redefining or subverting of the definition of normalcy, and a restructuring of ideological systems and social hierarchies. In contemporary Western societies, human-animals2 are so firmly embedded in speciesist anthropocentric biases that establish animals as “nonhuman animals” or “animal others,” they are incapable of imagining that animals have the capacity for far more agency than they themselves will ever wield. In their Magic Realist novels Blood and Chocolate (1997) and Owl in Love (1994), two Young Adult authors, Annette 1 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1981), 4. 2 I use “human-animal” rather than “human” or “human being” to remind and (re)establish that humanity is only one out of over a million species inhabiting Earth. Separating the terms “human” and “animal” disassociates humanity from the animal kingdom and maintains speciesism and anthropocentrism. I reject “animal other” and “nonhuman animal.” These labels define the animal exclusively through a relationship to human-animals thus promoting and perpetuating speciesist anthropocentric attitudes and practices. Likewise, “nonhuman” defines animals through a vocabulary of deficiency; they are not human-animal thus they are Other—subordinate or object in contrast to human-animals’ subject status. Therefore, despite the unfortunate necessity of divisive binaries, “animal” will represent those species with which human-animals share the taxonomic Kingdom of Animalia.

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Curtis Klause and Patrice Kindl respectively, posit that human-animals lack the agency (thus, the ability, power, and intelligence) to sit atop the evolutionary ladder; this rung is occupied by were-animals. These authors question and subvert representations of human-animals and animals through a dissolution of boundaries constructed by anthropocentric belief systems. Although, within their own societies, animals often have definitive social codes and may be accountable to members of their social group or species, they owe no such obligation to humananimal society; they have never agreed to live under human-animals’ jurisdiction. Accordingly, in theory, animals retain their autonomy. In literature, particularly, animals are separate from any social sanctions that might determine or limit human-animal behavior; ironically, they owe this freedom to the human-animals who refuse to acknowledge kinship, rejecting them as Other. In the actual world, however, amidst societies that measure animals’ worth through their use-value, animals will continue to be commodified and dominated until either animals resist or human-animals alter current practices and cease to embrace speciesist anthropocentric ideologies.3 Klause and Kindl create arenas in which anthropocentrism must be dismissed because human-animals are not the superior species. The representation of were-animals, particularly in their animal state in contrast to their human-animal form, complicates boundaries that supposedly differentiate animals from human-animals and invites readers to confront similarities between species in contrast to the differences normally highlighted. In both works, the main characters have the potential to stimulate readers to confront, interrogate, and amend their previously passive acceptance of prevailing anthropocentric attitudes. Both authors empower their teenaged were-characters with agency to topple hegemonic principles and challenge readers’ unthinking membership in carnivistic4 societies. By envisaging human-animals not only as the inferior species but also by placing them in the position of “meat” and “game,” Klause and Kindl subvert hierarchical structures

3 I am using a Marxist definition of ideology: “the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group,” (Althusser 107), and “the set of ideas which arise from a given set of material interests or, more broadly, from a definite class or group,” Raymond Williams, “Ideology,” Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 156. 4 I created the terms “carnivism,” “carnivist,” and “carnivistic” to define a practice, a person, and a society, behavior, or ideology, respectively, that unthinkingly consume animals—both at the literal and the figurative levels.

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providing were-animals with a means of resistance and empowerment. Simultaneously, both authors reveal humanity’s speciesist actions as firmly situated in and motivated by fear—the human-animal fear of the Other—the fear of the loss of dominion—the fear that humanity is not the superior species. Klause’s Blood and Chocolate features sixteen-year-old Vivian Gandillon, a female member of a werewolf pack that relocates to Maryland after “the ban on human flesh”5 is broken, forcing the pack to leave West Virginia. Her father, the pack’s leader, is killed in an earlier uprising, leaving the pack in complete disarray. Amidst intra-pack competition for a new leader and disputes over ancient pack traditions, Vivian struggles with questions of identity and alterity. Despite her inherent pack loyalty, Vivian discovers a discomfiting desire to integrate with human-animal high school students, even to the exclusion of her own peers. As she begins to date outside both pack and species, she endeavors to define her place and identity as a female werewolf within human-animal society as well as werewolf society. Battling inner and social demons, Vivian must choose between the temptation of humananimal society with the relative safety of remaining true to her nature and her kind. Kindl’s Owl in Love is a coming-of-age tale of two wereowls. Owl Tycho is a wereowl born to witches; her family tree is rife with shapeshifters.6 Accordingly, her upbringing enables her comprehension of her nature as well as that of human-animals, including their contradictions and limitations and the means by which she can blend into their society should she so desire. In contrast, the male main character is introduced gradually to readers through jumbled snapshots—his confused thoughts as human-animal as well as his scattered actions as an owl observed by Owl. Eventually, Owl deduces that he too is a wereowl, and ultimately, he emerges as David Lindstrom, the son of Owl’s science teacher for whom Owl harbors a secret infatuation.

5 Annette Curtis Klause, Blood and Chocolate (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1997), 10. 6 Two main differences separate shapeshifters from those who define themselves solely as were-animals. Although they usually favor a particular animal, true shapeshifters can become any animal; their transformations are deliberate. Were-animals only can become one specific species and experience two types of change: voluntary and compulsory, dictated by the lunar cycle. Klause describes, “Like all her people, at the full moon [Vivian] had to change whether she wanted to or not, the urge was too strong to refuse. Other times she could change at will, either partway or fully,” Klause, 29.

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As a wereowl born to non-were-animal parents,7 David’s instincts, behavior, and appetites, although natural for an owl or wereowl, are completely foreign, seemingly unmanageable, and, consequently, frightening and perverse to his human-animal mother and father. When David does not behave within the hegemonically defined conventions of normalcy for a human-animal child, his parents believe he is mentally ill. Donna Haraway describes the effect Others can cause: “Outside the security checkpoint of bright reason, outside the apparatuses of reproduction of the sacred image of the same, these ‘others’ have a remarkable capacity to induce panic in the centers of power and self-certainty.”8 As is common in Western societies, that which does not conform to designated standards of normal behavior is closeted away. David is sent to a mental institution. Reflecting upon David’s early childhood, Owl empathizes: “I know something by now of the human race. He would have been an object of fear and disgust even to those who loved him the most. His deepest, most vital needs would have made him a monster in their eyes and, eventually, in his own eyes as well.”9 When human-animals are faced with the unexplainable or unexplained, it is often easier to make the object of fear disappear than to confront it, especially when a human-animal begins to assume the attributes of an animal. Walter Benjamin posits, “In an aversion to animals the predominant feeling is fear of being recognized by them through contact. The horror that stirs deep in man is an obscure awareness that in him something lives so akin to the animal that it might be recognized. . . . He may not deny his bestial relationship with animals, the invocation of which revolts him: he must make himself its master.”10 The Lindstroms are ignorant of their son’s were-ness; they fear that which they do not understand and feel powerless. David Nibert explains, “One important aspect of

7 Owl’s mother mentions that Owl’s great-great-great aunt on her father’s side married a Lindstrom, Patrice Kindl, Owl in Love, (New York: Puffin, 1994), 75. This marriage accounts for a shapeshifter born to “normal” parents and the introduction of were-animal blood into the Lindstrom bloodline. After David is revealed as a wereowl, his father recalls, “There are traditions in our family about a curse, of all the crazy things. A strange condition that crops up every few generations. I thought it was some peculiar hereditary disease,” Kindl, 201. 8 Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet, Posthumanities, Vol. 3, edited by Cary Wolfe, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 10. 9 Kindl, Owl in Love, 189. 10 Walter Benjamin, “Gloves,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, introduction and edited by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Helen and Kurt Wolff-Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 66–67.

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power is the ability of one group to exert its will against another. . . . humans tend to disperse, eliminate, or exploit a group they perceive to be unlike themselves (an outgroup or the ‘other’).11 By locking David away, the Lindstroms ostensibly control the problem, master the animal, regain their power, and retain their superiority. Both Klause and Kindl obscure hegemonic biases of anthropocentrism as they imbue their were-animals with the unshakeable belief that human-animals are only half of a whole—mere shadows only capable of one form, one type of being. In contrast, were-animals can assume human-animal form or animal form. They are complete. When Vivian finds herself attracted to Aiden Teague, a human-animal male, his “impairment” is a major concern: “He was human, for Moon’s sake—half a person;” “[Aiden was] an incomplete creature who had only one form. How sad.”12 Owl, likewise, pities human-animals, regarding them matter-of-factly as a lesser species. Her disdain is clearly evident in her various comments: “Owl eyesight is far superior to human vision, just as our sense of hearing far surpasses yours,” and “Earthbound structures can never look as impressive to a sky creature as they do to those who must crawl over the ground always looking up and never down.”13 Were-animals are uniquely situated to perceive that only beings who experience the world both as human-animal and as animal are capable of truly appreciating every aspect of life—both in Nature and in Culture. Only were-animals are whole. At various points in both texts, were-animals struggle to coexist with and amongst human-animals while simultaneously retaining their own culture—a culture that places them firmly outside of human-animals’ social and cultural norms. As defined by German ethnologist Hans Peter Duerr, “A werewolf [and I would suggest any were-animal] is a human being who can dissolve the boundary between civilization and wilderness in himself and is capable of crossing over the fence which separates his ‘civilized side’ from his ‘wild side.’ . . . Consequently, this creature is the first to develop a consciousness of his ‘cultural nature.’”14 As such, were-animals form a bridge between Nature and Culture rather than

11 David Nibert, Animal Rights, Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 13. 12 Klause, 25; 29, respectively. 13 Kindl, 23; 48, respectively. 14 Hans Peter Duerr, Traumzeit, quoted in Jack Zipes, Editor, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2nd ed (New York: Routledge, 1993), 68.

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forcing a binary or separation that, in fact, cannot exist despite humananimals’ attempts to perpetuate such a division. Were-animals are the embodiment of Donna Haraway’s natureculture—her chimera—her cyborg. Haraway articulates, “The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signaling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling.”15 Wereanimals exist because boundaries cannot. The separation of Nature and Culture perpetuates a false dichotomy maintained for the benefit of those who would continue to commodify Nature and subjugate the Other, maintaining hierarchical practices of speciesism. As boundaries dissipate, hybrids or cyborgs proliferate, and distinctions between Nature and Culture blur. Despite their recognition of and sometimes evident disdain for humanity’s limitations, were-animals are still fully capable of understanding, appreciating, and thus melding Nature and Culture—both were-animal and human-animal—to an extent that human-animals are incapable. Only as animal and human-animal is a being complete; anything else is inferior. Through seemingly guileless presentations of were-animals as complete beings in contrast to the deficiency inherent in human-animals, Klause and Kindl subversively suggest that readers question their own lack of were-ness—of animality—and begin to challenge anthropocentric assumptions. As aforementioned, Western society conceives of itself as the center of the universe, interpreting the world exclusively in terms of humananimal values, appetites, experiences, needs, and desires. Humanity discriminates against all other species and exploits the earth solely for its benefit. The majority of Western human-animals are carnivores, consuming animal flesh by tradition, through an automatic acceptance of familial or cultural practices, or by preference, not by necessity. In his groundbreaking book Animal Liberation, Peter Singer demonstrates that meat production is not only an unconscionable use of the planet’s resources but also neglects global issues of famine and malnutrition.16 A calf consumes 21 pounds of plant protein for every pound of animal

15 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 152. 16 Farmed animals are the primary cause of global warming, creating “more greenhouse gas emissions (18%) than the world’s entire transport system (13.5%),” Vegetarian Society, “National Vegetarian Week,” 2007, http://www.vegsoc.org/vegweek/reasons .html.

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protein produced; a piglet consumes 8 pounds for every pound produced. Thus, one acre of land can produce either 300–500 pounds of plant protein or 40–55 pounds of animal protein.17 Yet, wealthy nations continue to raise animals for meat, while globally, millions of people starve.18 Meat becomes a symbol of prosperity and success. Meat is representative of human-animal supremacy. Meat equals dominion. Human-animals are conquerors, consumers, subjects; animals are conquered, consumed, objects. Klause and Kindl invert this traditional human-animal/animal relationship of consumer and consumed, carnivore and meat. Through the were-characters’ perspectives of human-animals, readers perceive of themselves as meat and question their own unexamined exploitation of animals. Klause’s werewolves frequently use “meat-boy,” “meat-girl,” and “meat-people” to refer to human-animals in contrast to the more formal “Homo sapiens.”19 They refer to themselves as “Homo lupus” or “loups-garoux.”20 Their “slanguage” explicitly emphasizes werewolf superiority/human-animal inferiority. Although not all the werewolves employ the slanderous verbiage, most of them, including Vivian, consciously and subconsciously think of human-animals as meat-people, even if they attempt to refer to them as humans or Homo sapiens. As meat, human-animals lack agency; they cease to be subjects and become objects. The werewolves’ perception of human-animals as meat parallels many contemporary societies’ perception of cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens; these animals cease to exist as beings (if, indeed, they ever were considered individual entities) and become meat. Carol J. Adams ascribes the term “absent referent”21 to the living animal who is obliterated through words such as “meat,” “hamburger,” “steak,” “veal,” and “leather.” These terms allow consumers to distance themselves from the animal and enjoy the relative safety of ignorance. Adams explains that these words enable human-animals to ignore the animal who died to provide them with a meal. Language thus functions to “keep something (like hamburger) from being seen as having been someone

17

Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 1975 (New York: Ecco-Harper, 2002), 165. Various studies postulate that world hunger and malnutrition would cease if affluent nations reduced meat consumption and livestock populations and distributed the “wasted food,” Singer, 166. 19 Klause, 29; 50; 228; 40, respectively. 20 Klause, 183; 13, respectively. 21 Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1992), 40. 18

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(a cow, a lamb, a once-alive being, a subject).”22 Clearly agreeing with Adams, Nick Fiddes further postulates, “The names we give to the flesh of the main meat animals are another device whereby we reduce the unpleasant impact of having to acknowledge their identity. We do not eat cow, we eat beef; we do not eat pig, we eat pork; we do not eat deer, we eat venison. It is as if we cannot bear to utter the name of the beast whose death we have ordained.”23 Similarly, animals are slaughtered; human-animals are murdered. Language maintains distance, perpetuates difference, and enables guilt-free killing and consumption. As Adams aptly acknowledges, “Animals are rendered being-less.”24 The vocabulary used by human-animals to describe meat tends to camouflage or conceal the animal as the source of the meal; in contrast, “meat-boy,” “meat-girl,” and “meat-people” acknowledge the beings from whence the food originates—people. The terminology is overtly derogatory, objectifying human-animals and signifying difference; however, the language simultaneously, albeit subversively, reminds the werewolves of their similarities with humanity. Although some meat forms actually acknowledge their animal origin—lamb chops, chicken wings, pigs’ feet, frogs’ legs—the animal flesh usually arrives or is purchased upon clean styrofoam trays, wrapped in cellophane, mostly devoid of excess blood and gore and completely removed from the actual killing, butchering, and preparation that separated the chops or wings or feet or legs from the living breathing animal being. The process is sanitized for the protection and the continued and preferred ignorance of consumers. The question begs to be asked: if restaurant menus offered “dead baby cow” instead of veal or “ground-up cow flesh with cheese” instead of a burger with cheese, would consumers be able to distance themselves quite so easily from the source of their meal? For the werewolves, human-animals can be perceived of as meat; however, they are still simultaneously viewed as “people.” By retaining the term “people,” Klause’s werewolves stress the resemblance of human-animals to werewolves when the werewolves are in humananimal form. The incorporation of the word “people” functions both as a continual reminder of kinship and of human-animal inferiority, stressing difference: human-animals are incapable of transforming into

22 23 24

Carol J. Adams, The Pornography of Meat (New York: Continuum, 2003), 23. Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol (London: Routledge, 1991), 97. Adams, Politics, 47.

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wolves; as a result, they become meat—they are consumable. While Adams contends, “Viewing other beings as consumable is a central aspect of [human-animal] culture”25 based, as it is, firmly in carnivism, it is clearly a central part of werewolf culture as well.26 Although human-animals can be considered prey, were-lore explains the ban on human-animal flesh: “When the Goddess, the Lady Moon, gave wolf-kind the gift to change, she warned the first loups-garoux to pity humans for their soft, immutable flesh, for wolf-kind had once been like them. ‘Use your eyes,’ the Goddess said. ‘Look at them and praise my name for changing you; kill them and kill yourselves.’ But humans were vulnerable and preylike. They triggered the instinct to hunt.”27 Were-lore reminds werewolves of their commonality with humananimals, stressing similarity in contrast to difference. Despite the fact that eating human-animals is strictly forbidden,28 a few rebellious, young werewolves continue the practice to prove werewolf superiority. Adams asserts consumption “is what subjects do to objects, what someone does with something.”29 Human-animals are reduced to food or “game” (in both senses of the word) as werewolves establish physical superiority in a society in which human-animals, by virtue of their sheer numbers, retain dominance. Similarly, werewolves’ wordplay (meat-people) diminishes human-animals’ importance while simultaneously demonstrating an aspect of the werewolves’ intellectual superiority. Haraway suggests, “Changes in terminology can signal important mutations in the character of relationships—commercially, epistemologically, emotionally, and politically. . . . ‘New’ names mark changes in power, symbolically and materially remaking kin and kind.”30 The werewolves’ literal and figurative consumption of human-animals empowers them, enabling them to claim subject status and relegate human-animals to objects. Likewise, through the werewolves’ reference to human-animals as “Homo sapiens” in contrast to “humans” or “human beings,” Klause also creates distance between readers and the human-animal characters

25

Adams, Pornography, 12. Vital to survival, meat consumption is a primary concern of carnivores. Humananimals do not require meat to survive; therefore, they are not justified in viewing other beings as consumable. 27 Klause, 55–56. 28 The ban on human-animal flesh ensures the werewolves’ survival. Human-animal deaths could lead to exposure, threatening pack safety. 29 Adams, Pornography, 13. 30 Haraway, When Species, 135. 26

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with whom they might naturally affiliate themselves. Readers are thus prevented from aligning themselves with particular characters based solely on commonality of species and are provided with opportunities to view human-animals as one of many species in contrast to the species. Likewise, labeled as Homo sapiens by the werewolves, humananimal characters are severed from vocabulary that carries favorable connotations and is rooted in the word “human” such as humanity, humane, humanitarian, and so forth. The werewolves again employ subtle alterations of language in order to denigrate human-animals as they simultaneously indicate their superiority. In Owl in Love, food and consumption function as a metaphor for assimilation into human-animal society and as a means of enabling the inversion of existing power structures. Human-animals’ constant endeavors to force the wereowls to consume human-animal food represent their manipulations to acculturate the wereowls into human-animal society while they simultaneously parallel contemporary society’s persistent maneuvers to integrate individuals into the hegemonic machine. Kindl separates food into two categories: owl fare and human-animal fare. Both Owl and David partake of human-animal food: Owl on occasion, and David because he lacks options, opportunity, knowledge, and volition. A human-animal diet is not only detrimental to wereowls but also, on a long-term basis, effectively obliterates their very nature. They lose the ability to become animal: only the human-animal half remains. They are fragments of themselves—“de-wered”—normal and thus ready for integration. Unlike human-animals who do not require animal protein to survive, wereowls are carnivores; they must consume meat in order to maintain not only their lives as wereowls but their very identities. Carnivores’ diets mandate the intake of flesh. Human-animals are omnivores; they eat flesh and plant and therefore are neither reliant upon animal protein nor even require it for nutritional purposes. Most animal predators lack alternative sources of nourishment. These major distinctions between carnivore and omnivore define the difference: one animal requires meat; the other does not. One animal has dietary options; the other does not. Whether human-animals consume animal flesh by choice, by tradition, or simply through an automatic, unthinking acceptance of the dominant practices of family, culture, habit, or society, that consumption is not a necessity; alternatives are available. The same is not true for animal carnivores who are not only dependent upon flesh for survival but also do not have options and cannot survive on a meat-free diet. For those were-animals who are

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carnivores, in contrast to a werellama or were-elephant, dietary needs necessitate the intake of animal flesh. Carnivorous consumption, for werewolves, wereowls, or any other meat-eating were-animal, unlike for human-animals, is a natural and fundamental process. The necessity of consuming flesh, not only for sustenance but to enable transformation, although only understood instinctively, is presumably the very practice that causes David’s incarceration. Although never overtly stated, events mentioned throughout Owl in Love suggest David’s parents institutionalize him because they believe he is torturing birds and small animals rather than attempting to gain the sustenance he craves. Not recognizing their son as a wereowl, they are unprepared to handle his behavior and are ignorant of his nutritional requirements. When Owl realizes that the boy and the owl she has been observing are one and the same, she envisages his parents “shut[ting] him up as a mad boy when he persisted, when he tried to catch the prey he must have, if he was to transform. How then could he prove them wrong, show evidence of his double nature, even to himself”?31 Failing to identify David as wereowl, his parents lock him away, effectively destroying his identity—his true nature—in an attempt either to “cure” his abnormality or remove the social aberration until David is suitable for social assimilation. The mental institution, however, is redundant; David’s human-animal body serves as an efficient prison. Human-animal foods and medications bind him to the earth, confining him more effectively than any locks or restraints. As confirmed by Duerr, “A werewolf [or wereowl] is a creature who looks ‘straight into the eyes’ of his ‘animal nature,’ which is usually kept under lock and key by his culture.”32 “Animal nature” must be kept under “lock and key” in order for human-animals to maintain their sense of superiority and their belief that humanity’s place at the top of the hierarchical ladder is secure. But the truth remains: human-animals are afraid. If fear did not exist, animals and “animal nature” would not be perceived as a menace. As Erica Fudge accurately identifies, “Mastery—control, domination—is the means by which we annihilate the fear.”33 Only when Owl recognizes the wereowl in David and feeds him the proper diet is he freed from his human-animal cell and able to take flight, both

31 32 33

Kindl, 188–89. Duerr, quoted in Zipes, 68. Erica Fudge, Animal (London: FOCI-Reaktion, 2002), 8.

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literally and figuratively. Only the removal of human-animal constraints enables the empowerment of the animal. Despite David’s oblivion about his were-ness—he has never transformed and thus never flown—he instinctively senses the danger to which a human-animal diet subjects him. As he plans his escape from the asylum, he thinks: “The forest was waiting for him, and the cold dark sky. But first, he was hungry. He had not eaten for twenty-four hours. He hadn’t wanted to be weighted down with their false food. Creeping downstairs in the dark he’d felt so light, as though he could have floated like a bubble.”34 Defining it as “false,” David inherently comprehends that human-animal food imprisons him, weighing him down. Reenacting the behavior that perhaps caused his confinement, David catches, kills, and consumes a rat before he flees. Properly nourished, he feels better, “lighter” than he has in years. His rejection of human-animal food indicates David’s newfound autonomy, foreshadowing his metamorphosis and ability for flight. Human-animal fare is likewise the cause of many of Owl’s problems. While peer pressure, taunting, teasing, and cruelty are virtually unavoidable in adolescence and considered within normal parameters of teen behavior, this type of behavior in adults, especially when directed toward teenagers, is unconscionable. Owl, however, is harassed not only by her peers but also by educational authority figures because she neither brings a lunch to school nor partakes of school meals. Adult authority figures are socially and ethically obligated to offer Owl support and protection from persecution rather than add to her victimization. Instead, they pressure Owl to eat human-animal foods, subversively attempting to integrate her into human-animal society. Owl, however, perceives these efforts as actions based in concern: “My coloring in health is naturally gray rather than rosy, and this convinced them all that I was at death’s door, entirely owing to my refusal to eat the ‘nice ravioli’ or pizza or whatever disgusting messes the school kitchen produced.”35 Despite Owl’s rejections, human-animal fare continues to plague her existence. Raised on an entirely owl appropriate diet, only Owl’s attraction to a male human-animal as potential mate motivates her interest in the consumption of human-animal nourishment. “In owl courtship the

34 35

Kindl, 104. Kindl, 6.

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male tenderly feeds his lady a mouse with the head torn off or some other similarly tempting tidbit.”36 Owl appreciates that human-animal society is similar to owl society, and “food is clearly a key ingredient to romance.”37 At some point, she will need to eat with Mr. Lindstrom. Owl’s dilemma rests in the very real and permanent danger the consumption of human-animal food presents: “If I were to eat human food I would lose the ability to fly, even the ability to transform to owl shape. Just a few bites would not do much harm, but the more I eat, the more obstinately human I become.”38 Despite the inherent danger, she attempts to contrive a compromise and blends human-animal and owl fare in a mouse-on-white sandwich. Her experiment is a dismal failure. “The bread, which after all is a strange food, made of a paste of grasses and greases swollen with the gassy emissions of yeast plants, sat very heavily upon my stomach. It seemed to swell until I felt as though I had swallowed a whole loaf instead of two thin slices.”39 Days pass before Owl is able to transform. On a separate occasion, attempting to facilitate Owl’s assimilation, Dawn offers her junk food ranging from cookies to potato chips. Owl finally accepts a Hostess Suzy Q snack cake. Even this small alteration from her owl diet, however, prevents her metamorphosis for several hours, entrapping her in a human-animal prison and effectively denying Owl her identity. The food continually offered to Owl—pizza, white bread, Ding Dongs, cookies, chips, hot dogs, Suzy Q’s—to tempt her to conform and lure her into membership in human-animal society is “junk food,” essentially nutritionally void and potentially harmful to human-animals, causing energy surges followed by fatigue and weight gain. Junk food and fast food are dietary staples both in the United States which boasts the highest obesity rate of any nation on the planet and Great Britain which holds the highest obesity rate in Europe.40 Humanity’s passion for and fascination with junk and fast food are not merely a matter of poor dietary habit; it is far more subversive and represents the dominant ideology at work. One of the founders of McDonald’s, 36

Kindl, 7. Kindl, 7. 38 Kindl, 6. 39 Kindl, 11. 40 Richard Edwards, “Britain is Sickliest Nation in Europe,” Telegraph.co.uk, October 24, 2007, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/23/ nsick123.xml. 37

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Ray Kroc, admits, “We have found out . . . that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. . . . We will make conformists out of them in a hurry . . . The organization cannot trust the individual.”41 Clearly, attempts to assimilate Owl into the hegemonic machine are far more treacherous than they previously appeared. Of all the possible human-animal fare that Owl could be offered, she is provided with junk food that would effectively ground her and thus ensure her place amongst the masses. Human-animal fare, both its offering and consumption—commonly considered representative of home, security, love, and family for human-animals—instead signifies insidiousness, treachery, danger, and the complete loss of autonomy, health, and identity for David and Owl. Similar to the werewolves’ wordplay with and appropriation of human-animal vocabulary, Kindl’s second major use of food likewise is based in language. Owl uses food and consumption terminology in her contemplation of human-animals, specifically her love interest Mr. Lindstrom, to commodify and objectify human-animals. Comparing her feelings for Mr. Lindstrom to hunger and her need to be satiated, Owl admits that at night, in owl form, “I watch him while I should be hunting. When I don’t hunt, I don’t eat. I grow thin for love of Mr. Lindstrom.”42 Dawn Mitchell, a schoolmate who is as close as Owl comes to a friend, observes Owl’s unusual behavior around their teacher: “The way you stare at him, like you wanna just eat him right up . . . whew! It’s really intense.”43 When Owl believes she has lost Mr. Lindstrom, despite that he was never hers, she again uses language of sustenance, or the lack thereof, as a metaphor for her emotional state: “I was nothing more than a consuming hunger, a gaping hole demanding to be filled.”44 At this point, Owl considers herself incomplete without him. She neither desires to be human-animal nor wishes to join human-animal society; she simply longs for Mr. Lindstrom as her mate. She attempts to explicate the depth of her emotions, justifying that unlike psychologists might suggest, she is not looking for a substitute father-figure: “My father is pale as a potato sprouting in a root cellar; Mr. Lindstrom is red and brown and furry like the flanks of

41 Quoted in Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, (New York: Perennial-HarperCollins, 2002), 5. 42 Kindl, 1. 43 Kindl, 28. 44 Kindl, 77.

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a deer mouse.”45 The significance of her similes relies on familiarity with wereowls’ dietary needs. As aforementioned, human-animal fare inhibits metamorphosis thus affecting physical, mental, and emotional well-being. More significantly, if eaten in quantity or for long periods of time, human-animal food causes permanent irreparable damage: the loss of the animal self. For Owl, potatoes are indigestible and pose a threat. In contrast, mice are a dietary staple, both for owls and for Owl, offering strength, energy, flight, and freedom, in other words, agency. Through the rose-colored lenses of her infatuation, Owl likens Mr. Lindstrom to autonomy in contrast to the lethargy, entrapment, loss, and danger represented by potatoes, and by extension, her father, who would maintain Owl’s childhood innocence. Owl believes her father refuses to acknowledge her impending maturity and with it, her need for a mate. Owl’s comparison of her father to a potato, a food that inhibits not only her transformation but, in turn, her very identity, indicates her growing independence and maturation as well as her growing frustration. Despite her father’s best intentions, his efforts to be supportive fail as he continually misreads Owl’s desires and needs. Believing Mr. Lindstrom does not return Owl’s affections, Mr. Tycho growls, “A man so thickheaded, so boorish, as not to appreciate your fine qualities? What sort of a man is that, after all? The swine;”46 he then threatens to kill Lindstrom. Unfortunately, his reaction could not have been farther from the support Owl craves. She thus perceives her father not only as useless but also, at least temporarily, as a menace, in contrast to Mr. Lindstom, the figurative consumption of whom offers her sustenance and agency. Owl’s continued comparison of Mr. Lindstrom to food and her desire to “consume” him suggest that, despite her illusion of infatuation, Owl subconsciously perceives of human-animals as significant only insofar as their use-value—whether as mates, caregivers, educators or friends. Kindl subverts the traditional relationship between human-animals and animals (or were-animals) in which human-animals are the subjects and consumers and animals/were-animals are the objects and commodities. From Owl’s perspective, she is the subject, the consumer; Mr. Lindstrom, Dawn, and other human-animals are objects, commodities, the consumed. Only when Owl listens to Dawn

45 46

Kindl, 1–2. Kindl, 20.

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and accepts that perhaps David indeed needs his parents is she finally completely able to accept Dawn as a being with inherent value, despite Dawn’s inability to transform. Owl’s representation of Mr. Lindstrom as a rodent acknowledges her subconscious understanding that he can never serve as a suitable mate to a wereowl, as Owl is well aware: “The barren, desert distances that separated Mr. Lindstrom and me seemed to stretch to truly Sahara-like proportions. Not only are we of different generations, but we do not even belong to the same species. No, nor do we belong to the same genus, family, order, or class.” 47 Human-animals are grounded and thus inferior. Mr. Lindstrom can never fly with Owl. For Owl, he merely functions as a snack—an hors d’oeuvre—a placeholder upon which she can focus her attention until she meets her true soul mate. Kindl’s reversal of conventional power structures enables readers to perceive of a situation in which they are not the dominant species. Such recognition creates a conduit not only to understanding their own embeddedness in a speciesist culture that denigrates the Other but also to opportunities for ideological alteration and acceptance of alterity. Both Kindl and Klause transpose the anthropocentric constructs of Western carnivistic societies by placing human-animals into positions normally reserved for animals—that of the consumed, of meat, of Other. By enabling readers to contemplate human-animals (and, by extension, themselves), as meat and consumable, Klause and Kindl incite their audience to confront and question its passive acceptance of dominant ideologies such as carnivism, speciesism, and anthropocentrism. Fiddes articulates, “Belief in human dominion does not merely legitimate meat eating—the reverse is also true: meat reinforces that presumption. Killing, cooking, and eating other animals’ flesh provides perhaps the ultimate authentication of human superiority over the rest of nature, with the spilling of their blood a vibrant motif.”48 Werewolves do not need to kill and eat human-animals to authenticate themselves. They are fully cognizant of their superiority.49 Only their dwindling numbers maintain their position of subjugation. Gabriel explains the reality of the werewolves’ existence to Vivian: “There’s no wilderness to hide in anymore. We can’t run in packs in the mountains where travelers go 47

Kindl, 7. Fiddes, 65. 49 The human-animal murders are acts of rebellion in response to intra-pack politics, not cravings for human-animal flesh. 48

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unmissed for months, there are no black forests that stretch on for days, and it’s been many centuries since we ruled small kingdoms in the dark center of Europe as if we were gods. Homo sapiens is everywhere, they outnumber us, and Homo lupus must live beside them. As much as we might crave to, we cannot kill them. To do so endangers us. . . . Sometimes I think we have outlived our time.”50 Klause and Kindl deploy the literal and figurative were-animal consumption of human-animals as well as the perception of human-animals as meat to alter structures of dominion, empowering the previously marginalized as the dominant are disempowered. Insightful readers may ask themselves, “What is the difference between me and other animals who are eaten or worn? What prevents someone from viewing me as ‘meat’? What prohibits me from becoming assimilated into the hegemony—significant solely for my use-value to society—a commodity? Besides fear of the Other, what maintains the boundaries that enable dominion, commodification, and separation caused by speciesism?” The answer is nothing. Humanity perpetuates fear, cruelty, and hatred toward other species in order to maintain dominion. The desire and need for superiority supersede all else. Human-animals desperately cling to notions of their agency. A consideration of agency is difficult without acknowledging the elusiveness of its definition, or rather, the elusiveness of its actuality. If it can be agreed upon that agency exists, then it must be acknowledged that agency only exists in degrees and is often a construct of the individual as well as the society within which that individual lives. For integrated human-animals within Western societies, agency is always conditional, always limited. Agency is the ability to have some amount of control over one’s life as well as the ability to produce and enact resistance to existing structures and dominant ideologies. The degree to which individuals wield agency as a form of resistance is determined by innumerable factors such as hegemonic constraints and the measure to which someone is prepared to function outside of socially prescribed dictates, the desire and inclination to attempt to effect change, and the willingness to risk social alienation or punishment for actions perceived as anarchist, anti-social or treacherous. For were-animals, who precariously balance between the world of human-animals and that of animals and are not fully-fledged members

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Klause, 183.

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of either society, agency is limited only by those structures they choose to follow and those they follow for self-preservation. Through their transformative abilities, were-animals possess and exercise more agency than the great majority of human-animals. Since were-animals are neither recognized by nor accepted into the human-animal population, they cannot be expected to follow normative social guidelines and codes of behavior. In their animal forms, were-animals are at their most powerful, their most unrestrained. As animal, they are able to escape, if only temporarily, the subjection of a speciesist, anthropocentric, human-animal society that fears and persecutes them not only because they are Other but because their very existence proves human-animal inferiority. Their animal selves offer were-animals an understanding and respect of and for the natural world that is denied to human-animals as well as an escape from the shackles of human-animal culture and physicality. As wolf, Vivian rejoices in her nocturnal excursions through the woods. As owl, Owl soars through the evening skies. They hunt their own food and thus are not dependent upon agribusiness. They have their own pelts and feathers, respectively, and therefore are not reliant upon marketing trends or capitalism. As were-animals, they are provided not only with freedom as animal but also with escape from the trappings of materiality and consumerism. Free to travel between the realms of Nature and Culture, animal and human-animal, wereanimals command far greater agency than human-animals can ever hope to wield. The largest restrictions werewolves face, if only in their animal forms, are the problematic relationship wolves and human-animals have shared historically and the ever-increasing spread of human-animal civilization: limitations far greater than any dictated by pack law. The wolf/humananimal relationship is solidly founded in a history of decimation. Globally, wolves have been virtually obliterated. Human-animal populations increase and undeveloped land mass decreases as humanity appropriates and develops land and exploits natural resources. Although referring to the human-animal/animal, not were-animal, competition for land and food, Nibert’s description is exceedingly fitting: “The clearing of land that accompanied the advent and growth of agricultural society cost countless nonhuman animals dearly as the land they lived on was cleared for grazing or prepared for cultivation. Innumerable other animals were displaced, orphaned, or killed as their homelands were burned or razed. . . . Wolves, coyotes, large cats, and other carnivorous species also were seen as direct competitors both for the other animals who

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were now held captive and domesticated and for free-living species that humans viewed as desirable ‘quarry.’ Consequently, these competitors also came to be regarded as troublesome and were eradicated because of their perceived harm to human material interests.”51 Whether to wolves or werewolves in their animal form, civilization has been historically unkind and poses a never-ending ever-expanding threat. In their human-animal form, however, werewolves enjoy the liberty of unrestricted boundaries of nature and culture. Wereowls, in contrast, have few constraints, wielding even greater agency than werewolves since human-animals have yet to encroach on their air space. Since wereowls do not pose an active threat to humanity, they are not subject to restrictions such as those of the werewolves. Unlike werewolves who must transform on a full moon, wereowls’ metamorphoses are voluntary and intentional. They are creatures of earth and air, free to choose between legs and wings, walking and flight. In direct contrast to Vivian who yearns for acceptance into human-animal society, neither Owl nor David is particularly interested in humananimals or their culture. With the exception of a mate, wereowls are solitary creatures, free from social restrictions and structures. In their human-animal forms, were-animals may follow certain human-animal codes of behavior; however, because they have the ability to transform, authoritarian standards and discipline cannot be enforced. Human-animals have a lengthy, violent, and rather embarrassing history of trepidation and destruction surrounding anything or anyone they do not understand or who might prove to be superior and dislodge humanity from its stronghold at the top of the hierarchical ladder. In the rare altercations between human-animals and werewolves in Blood and Chocolate, the were-animals easily defeat the human-animals—both mentally and physically—demonstrating the indisputable superiority of the werewolves. Similarly, the wereowls prove their ability and indeed desire to survive “above” rather than amongst human-animals. Although were-animals commonly are represented as social outcasts, they are, in fact, separate and distinct from the society that ostracizes them. They cannot be considered outcasts when they are never truly part of that society and culture. Initially, Vivian yearns to be accepted into human-animal culture. Owl is perfectly content on her own, neither desiring acceptance nor interested in human-animal society. By

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Nibert, 25.

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both books’ conclusions, Vivian and Owl have gained a strong sense of their identity, and developed an understanding of their place in the world—firmly embracing their were-ness and traversing human-animal society. These books suggest that those who have melded their culture with their nature and are truly content with themselves are the ones who are the most powerful and the most evolved. Klause and Kindl’s werewolves and wereowls, respectively, confront species’ boundaries, dismantle false dichotomies such as that of animal/ human-animal and Nature/Culture, and posit enlightened discourses of animality. Through a position outside of and counter to the normative social order, including an interrogation and redefining or transgressing of the definition of normalcy, and a restructuring of ideological systems and social hierarchies, Blood and Chocolate and Owl in Love bridge the distance and forge a connection between human-animal and animal, rupturing prior cultural representations, relationships, and implications. Both authors empower their were-animals with agency and thus enable human-animal readers to cross (vicariously, of course), species boundaries and question concepts of animal as Other and evolutionary hierarchy. These novels represent an exploration and gradual recognition of the painfully slowly dissolving boundaries between human-animal and animal as well as the subversion of existing structures of humananimal dominion. Klause and Kindl attempt to situate readers in the affective experience of animal through their creation of kinship between human-animals and were-animals. Donna Haraway reminds us, “A cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.”52 Both texts stimulate readers to perceive of the possibility of the “subject-hood” of were-animals, both in their human-animal and their animal states; therefore, the leap to an appreciation of animals as subjects rather than objects is relatively small and easy. Through an affinity with were-animals in both their forms, readers gain the ability to view the animal as more than a mere object or Other, something to be dominated. The animal becomes a subject, a fully fleshed-out being with

52

Haraway, Simians, 154.

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agency, potentiality, and inherent rights. By enabling a perception of animals as individuals through were-animals, Klause and Kindl position their audience to interrogate and potentially dismantle anthropocentric speciesist binaries previously taken for granted. Readers thus have an opportunity to transgress dominant belief systems and potentially, through an alteration of their practices, effect cultural change. The were-animals in Blood and Chocolate and Owl in Love deconstruct the human-animal/animal dichotomy to remind human-animals of their kinship with other species as well as to suggest that humanity is not the superior species it likes to believe it is.

THE MICROGEOGRAPHY OF INFESTATION IN RELATIONSHIP SPACES Matthew Candelaria Humanity lives in the neon-lit world of the city it believes to be its own. After all, we built these cities, built them for our use according to our standards of aesthetic and use value. Everything in the city is defined by its relationship to us: our homes, our workplaces, our streets for our cars. But alongside ours there is another world, unseen by most, a world of creatures living in parallel with us, living under our feet, behind our walls, under our streets. I speak not of the species inhabiting the encysted pseudonature we call parks, nor of the servile creatures we bring into our homes for companionship, but of the species that have long since learned to harvest the waste of humanity’s largesse, species that can be conveniently lumped under the label “vermin.” Vermin is an apt word for describing the creatures I wish to discuss here, for it contains no explicit or implicit species designation, but refers instead to the propensity of these animals to live with and among us, opportunistically harvesting our food, water, and shelter resources to promote their own genetic heritage.1 Vermin are animals that live with humans against our will, animals that, in an age of extinctions, prosper despite our best efforts at their extermination. Vermin are rats, cockroaches, lice, flies, and others. They are distinct from what are often known as “varmints,” the predatory animals that competed with ranchers during the nineteenth century, but which during the first half of the twentieth century were largely successfully re-categorized as “wildlife,” one of the positive categories on the sociozoologic scale. They are animals far more aware of us than we are of them, animals whose success depends on their ability to observe us and our environment in ways that we are physically and psychologically unable. Vermin therefore provide a unique lens for viewing the city not as a built environment, but as a found environment; not a deliberate construction, but

1 Mary Fissell, “Imagining Vermin in Early Modern England.” History Workshop J (1999): 47, 4.

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an excrescence of our species that, like a coral reef, provides a habitat for innumerable species. Vermin also provide an ideal perspective with which to shatter the “lack of totemic imagination”2 that leads to humanity’s inability to conceive of itself as “animal subjects.”3 That it took Jacques Derrida, one of the great thinkers of our age, essentially his entire life to embrace his animal nature is indicative of our weakness.4 According to Sabloff, the totemic imagination in earlier peoples allowed them to conceive of animals as possessing godlike powers, powers that could infuse humanity with positive characteristics. If the route to breaking through this “poverty of discourse”5 is to see in animals more of “what we consider valuable in ourselves [. . .] above all, agency,”6 then vermin must play an essential role, because they express an agency that is above and beyond that of other animals. Mary Fissell suggests that vermin have lost their status as true competitors with humanity since the Early Modern period as they have come to be seen with more disgust,7 but this essay argues to the contrary. What other type of animal has directly faced off with the worst humanity has to offer and survived? All our efforts to “control” vermin have led to little progress, and they remain, more than any condor soaring over the California coast, potent symbols of the animal subject: free of human bondage, masters of their world and ours. Despite their significance as symbols of the potency of nature and as viewpoints through which to observe ourselves, vermin have been conspicuously neglected in the recent waves of ecocriticism and “animal anthropology.” For example, Sabloff focuses her analysis on two other categories of animals, pets and farm animals, despite the fact that the latter appear in cities only as artistic representations and as their products: steak, milk, and eggs. Nor is Sabloff alone. In Animal (2002), Erica Fudge follows Sabloff ’s lead, focusing on literary representations of farm animals and pets. John Simons, in Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation (2002), builds his study around the issue of animal experimentation. Indeed, the majority of essays and books devoted to considering the relationship between humans and animals 2 Annabelle Sabloff, Reordering the Natural World: Humans and Animals in the City (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001), 9. 3 Ibid., 11. 4 See Introduction, 9. 5 Sabloff, 11. 6 Ibid., 180. 7 Fissell, 47, 1.

the microgeography of infestation in relationship spaces 303 focuses on pets and farm animals, sometimes expanding to include hunting, zoos, and/or laboratory specimen, but generally neglecting verminous creatures. Critics tend to focus on relationships where humans maintain our agency and deny it to the animal subject. This neglect is due to an oversight on the part of the critics rather than on a dearth of material. Understanding the symbolic value of vermin depends on understanding the symbolic construction of the home. The Home Ecosystem In Colonial Urban Development (1976), Anthony D. King puts forward a list of five acultural needs that all people need, and that all homes must provide for: food, shelter, reproduction, socialization, and security.8 However, he points out that providing for these needs is a culturally mediated process, and that part of the mediating process is the concretion of these needs into the physical structures that provide for them. The outer frame is for security and shelter, while inside the house is divided into numerous separate spaces, each specialized to provide for each of these needs, and further fragmentation of these needs into smaller components. As Susan Kent notes in her cross-cultural study, “as a society becomes more sociopolitically complex its culture, behavior, or use of space, and cultural material or architecture become more segmented.”9 A kitchen to prepare food, and a dining room in which to eat it. A parlor for socializing with guests from outside the home separate from a living room in which family members gather. Bedrooms for sleeping, with doors to provide privacy for the ultrasegregated act of reproduction. Conspicuously absent from King’s list is the need to excrete and to remove waste from the home site, a function which also is highly segregated, often with a room or even building dedicated to excretion and its attendant function of washing to remove the animal taint of it. When dealing with vermin and their intersections with human culture, it is impossible to neglect this crucial function. In House Form and Culture (1969), Amos Rapoport criticizes the economic determinist view of the house, which, he says, neglects “the

8

Anthony D. King. Colonial Urban Development (London: Routledge, 1976), 12. Susan Kent. “A Cross-cultural Study of Segmentation, Architecture, and the Use of Space.” Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space, ed. Susan Kent (London: Cambridge UP, 1990), 117. 9

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idea of the house,”10 the summation of the social, moral, and religious concepts that determine how people choose to meet their economic needs from the options given them by their technological and environmental resources. In invading the house, vermin do not merely step into the space, but, rather, they intrude on the idea of the house. Henri Lefebvre uses the notion of “space” as a mediating step between the idea of the house and the house’s physical form. Lefebvre makes the distinction between the habitat of the home, the purely physical interactions in terms of eating, sleeping, defecating, and the like, which biologists would normally term a “microhabitat,”11 and the habiting of the home, which comprises the “poetic” interactions humans have with their homes in terms of decorating, and similar forms of aesthetic alterations.12 It would be wrong, however, to assume that this is a purely human need, that habiting is one of the “sources of gratification and self-realization”13 that separate humans from animals, for, as E. O. Wilson points out, aesthetic criteria are a product of our evolutionary history.14 In habiting the home, social interactions are given a “surface area”15 that then becomes embodied in the space. In largest social terms, our conception of how specific social interactions should be carried out becomes embodied in the way that physical houses are constructed, and these house forms then come to dominate the way individuals conduct their social relations. Any alterations of the physical habitat cannot help but alter the manner of inhabiting. An infestation by vermin can be a sudden, dramatic change in the physical habitat that leads to an equally significant alteration of the social relationship among the human inhabitants. Sometimes, an alteration is represented as a merely physical change that exacerbates characteristics already extant in the human agents, as in texts like Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, where the rats and roaches are part of the despised apartment, or the 2002 story “Roaches” by Stephen Byler which shows

10 Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 24. 11 Michael Rust, John Owens and Donald Reierson, eds. Understanding and Controlling the German Cockroach. (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), 15. 12 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution. Trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003), 81–2. 13 Kate Soper, “Nature/‘nature.’ ” Future Natural, ed. George Robertson, et al. (New York: Routledge, 1996), 28. 14 Edward Wilson, Biophilia. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984), 180. 15 Lefebvre, 86.

the microgeography of infestation in relationship spaces 305 how a cockroach infestation contributes to the decay of the narrator’s marriage. However, I am more interested in stories where the vermin demonstrate their agency and actively participate with humans in the habiting of space. In texts where vermin have agency, they utilize this agency usually in competition, but sometimes in concert with their human co-habitants, by inserting themselves not only into the space, but also into the relationships embodied in the space. When vermin compete with humans, the competition for control of the space also becomes a direct competition for a place in the relationship, creating forms of love triangles where either the human or the vermin must be displaced and a single master of the space established. On the other hand, when humans and vermin cooperate, the vermin foster human relationships that would otherwise be impossible, and the vermin show humans the regenerative nature of death and decay. Defragmenting the Home Daniel Evans Weiss’ novel The Roaches Have No King (1994) represents a conflict of cockroaches’ undifferentiated use of space against humanity’s system of segmentation. Cockroaches do everything—eating, defecating, mating, and the rest—everywhere they live. No space is dedicated to a particular task, counter to the Western logic of the household, “A place for everything and everything in its place,” which also categorically excludes vermin from all human dwellings. This conflict between specialized and generalized space use gives rise to two love triangles as the cockroach protagonist Numbers seeks to thwart the attempted segmentation of the kitchen cabinets from the rest of the apartment. The conflict between specialized and generalized space is first introduced in backhand fashion through a conversation among the cockroaches regarding language. One of the roaches notes, “The more mature a language is, the more specific its sounds are,”16 and then proceeds to show how unspecific human languages are, from ancient Egyptian to American English. The relative immaturity of human language feeds into the roaches’ general sense that human beings are far inferior to 16 Daniel Evan Weiss. The Roaches Have no King (New York: High Risk Books, 1994), 6.

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themselves when it comes to almost every aspect of survival. This distinction parallels the conception that more advanced societies tend to create more specialized and less all-purpose spaces.17 However, as Weiss shows us, it is roaches that have an immature, namely nonspecific, way of life. In Weiss’ novel, everything the roaches do is reduced in some way to eating, and eating takes place wherever roaches are present. At the novel’s beginning, Numbers tells us his mother escaped the kitchen of the apartment and loosed her ootheca in Ira Fishblatt’s bookcase. Numbers ate his way through the glue of Ira’s Bible, and just as he digested the glue, he internalized the stories, made them part of himself. The bookcase in the hall for a cockroach is a space for eating like the kitchen or the dining room, and reading for the cockroaches is just another act of eating. Everything in the novel is, for the cockroaches, lensed as a form of eating, from the noblest act of sacrifice in which a roach donates his carcass as food to his friend to the most base form of bribery. As we shall see, even basic biological functions like mating are transformed by Weiss into a form of eating. This is a logical if anthropocentric conception of roaches, for most of our interactions and images of them as well as other vermin are tied up with food. We are concerned that vermin will consume, or contaminate our foodstuffs, a fear played on brilliantly by Weiss. Weiss shows us this power of contamination when Numbers’ girlfriend Rosa Luxemburg conceals herself in a box of raisin bran. Ira consumes her, completely ignorant: “She thrashed until the tongue finally found her and swept her to the front, pushed her head on the block, and the ivory blade came down swift and sure, cutting her in two. She snapped like celery.”18 The intimate observation of Ira eating a cockroach in complete ignorance is typical of this novel. The scene enhances the notion of dedicated spaces as this event takes place in the dedicated food place, the kitchen and emphasizes cockroaches contaminating the human foodstuff. In the novel, most human eating and all food preparation takes place in the kitchen, the designated food place, the ultimate goal of the cockroach colony which has been banished from its environs by the machinations of Ira’s new girlfriend, Ruth. The novel’s plot depends on the cockroaches being completely dependent on a single ecological pathway, not only on human foodstuffs, but on those foodstuffs stored

17 18

Kent, 127. Rapoport, 9. Weiss, 38.

the microgeography of infestation in relationship spaces 307 in the designated food place, the kitchen cabinet. Under Ruth’s direction, Ira has replaced his cabinets with new ones that are roach-proof, save for one small chink in the wall, blocked only by Ira’s rainy-day money. Nonetheless, some human eating happens in the main room of Ira’s apartment. For the humans, eating itself has been broken down into further specialized parts, with some eating being solely for nutrition, while other eating is for socialization. The main room, directly adjacent to the entrance, is dedicated to socialization, and the novel gives us several key examples in an attempt to create a microcosm of human socialization. In the main room Ira entertains his neighbors with food and conversation, and in the same room he engages in a mail-order game of chess, representing both near and remote forms of socialization. Also in the great room, Ira transacts his small purchases of cocaine. The water closet is dedicated to excretion, and the taboo nature of this act make the space ideal also for the concealment of secrets. Observed only by the roaches, the corpulent Ruth whines at the slim blonde woman who is their neighbor, “You know, Elizabeth, I used to be a dancer until I was cursed with these large breasts.”19 But the main secret concealed in the water closet is the defecation itself, and the roaches are in a prime position to read that secret from under the toilet seat. Before Ruth excretes, Numbers is told by another roach that “Her delivery is good, and her parcels are even and firm and dark, almost as regular as ours,”20 but tonight is different. Tonight, “a sour-smelling green-speckled colloid shot out.”21 When Numbers sees Ruth’s loose stool, he deduces that the intestines admit what the mouth conceals: that Ruth is jealous of Elizabeth, and he begins to formulate his plan for regaining admission to the kitchen cabinets by getting Ira to spend his rainy-day money on a new woman. Numbers tries to create a love triangle between Ira, Ruth, and Elizabeth, but his efforts are doomed to fail because he does not understand the differentiation of space crucial to human society. In contrast to humanity’s diversity of space, roach sex happens wherever roaches meet, and eating wherever food is found. And anyone who has lived with roaches has seen the dark spots of their feces left

19 20 21

Ibid., 46. Ibid., 48. Ibid.

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randomly along their paths. Numbers uses his roach logic to conclude that if he can get Ira and Elizabeth alone together, then sex will just happen. He succeeds in getting them alone together in the dark in Elizabeth’s living room, but nothing happens. For humans in this novel, sleeping and sex take place in the bedroom, the special place dedicated to those purposes, and to truly understand human sexuality, that is where Numbers must go. At first, Numbers has every reason to believe that his love-triangle plan will work. Ruth is overweight, domineering, self-conscious, while Elizabeth is slender, firm-bodied, beautiful in all the ways human females are, from his observation point, supposed to be beautiful. She is also neglected by her husband in almost every way. However, this plan fails utterly, despite numerous attempts and schemes, and to determine why Numbers performs what he calls a “vaginal joust.”22 While they sleep, he crawls onto and into each woman’s vagina to determine the strength of her pheromones. Critics have read this scene in straightforward terms: “In this novel, the sexual associations of the cockroach are more graphically displayed than in any other work,”23 but ultimately the sex is made into eating. In order to test the strength of their pheromones, Numbers must get a sample of each woman’s fluid by invading their sleeping/sex space. After having utterly failed to get anything from Elizabeth, Numbers is determined not to fail with Ruth. After licking her clitoris until he was “dizzy and nauseated,”24 with no effect, he works himself up to a new level of resolve. He tells us, “I stretched forward and chomped down on the tip of her clit with my mandibles.”25 This action of eating gets a response, and soon Numbers is drenched in fluid. The fluid has a nutritive, not sexual, effect on Numbers. His research finished, Numbers prepares to leave by preening the dried fluid from his body: “It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise that the white powder, which was just dried hormones, again ignited my body. My back rippled with power.”26 Eating Ruth’s hormone-laden fluid causes Numbers’ largely vestigial wings to buzz to life, and he is able to fly around the apartment. Although the pairing of Ruth and Numbers can be seen as perverted

22 23 24 25 26

Ibid., 156. Marion Copeland. Cockroach (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 114. Weiss, 153. Ibid. Ibid., 154.

the microgeography of infestation in relationship spaces 309 sexuality, it is not until the next morning that Numbers realizes: “My excitement had been so wild that I had ejaculated into my beautiful Ruth without realizing it.”27 Sex is actually so subordinated to eating that it is practically imperceptible. Ruth’s hormones are to Numbers just a nutritive stimulant. By collapsing these diverse biological functions together, Weiss has achieved the epitome of undifferentiated space, everything is eating, and eating is done everywhere. And it is Ruth’s nutritive stimulation of Numbers that creates the second love triangle in the novel. Numbers no longer imagines replacing Ruth with Elizabeth, but, replacing Ira with himself. So when Ira removes his rainy-day money to buy cocaine, Numbers does not think of getting into the cabinets. He separates out the cocaine from the lactose used to cut it—which he eats—then replaces the lactose with lye, so that when Ira snorts it, the lye eats his mucous membranes, killing him almost instantly. Numbers crows at the novels’ end, “I had won the apartment, not just the inside of the wall. All this was mine. Perhaps best of all, I had won Ruth, as the ancient Hebrews won the women of the cities they conquered.”28 The conquest of the space is supplanting of Ira’s place with Ruth, and also with the conquest of Ira’s identity. Numbers has now fully assumed the mantle alluded to by his name: he has become the Jewish man in Ira’s stead. The Other Woman The Visitor (1981) by Chauncey G. Parker III builds horror around the blurring of the line between humanity and rats. Unlike The Roaches Have no King, where the cockroach becomes human, The Visitor tells the story of a man who becomes very ratlike. A wealthy New York banker, Bart Hughes, is renovating an old brownstone building downtown near where he works. The novel is set in the summer, when Bart’s wife and children are vacationing in Maine, and Bart visits them on the weekends. He is proud of the renovations and his home, thinking it the symbol of himself as a civilized and wealthy man, a genuine castle, but then a rat, the unwelcome visitor in the title, takes up residence in his home and slowly begins to tear it apart.

27 28

Ibid. Ibid., 249.

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Bart takes up arms to defend his home from this invader, but as traps and poison fail to kill the rat, Bart is forced to use ever more extreme forms of attack, and as the battle grows in intensity, Bart becomes more like the creature he faces, more like a rat himself. Simultaneously, though, the rat, which is female, becomes almost like a mistress, a secret affair that Bart conceals from his wife. Like The Roaches Have no King, The Visitor initially focuses on the interaction between vermin and stored human food. All Bart’s early signs of the rat come from its destruction of his foodstuffs. Then Bart attempts to utilize food dependency against the rat by baiting traps with human food. However, the novel moves on to explore several other ecological relations. First, Bart attempts to employ a poison that will give the rat a voracious thirst, causing it to seek water in the sewer where it will drink itself to death, but the rat avoids the poison. Then, Bart introduces a cat into the house, hoping it will devour the rat, but the rat instead kills and partially eats the cat. This inversion of power is crucial to the significance of the novel, for once the cat-rat relation is inverted, the entire social scale is subject to upending. Indeed, from this moment on, Bart himself begins his dissolution into rat-ness. Bart has no notion of the rat’s gender until he comes upon her brood of tiny, pink offspring. He quickly decides on a course of action and kills the young one by one, rapping them on the head with the fireplace poker, then dumping their bodies into a drain in the basement. Not only does this action signal Bart’s increasing dehumanization, but it is the first hint of a relationship between Bart and the rat. Bart’s action is like that of a rat’s when coming upon a brood of helpless young, but when the act is conducted by a male rat, it is not simple violence, but a sexual overture. As among many mammal species, the male often kills children of another male to induce the female to come to estrus sooner so that she can bear him children. From this point on, Bart’s increasing rat-ness is also accompanied by an increasing similarity between this conflict and an illicit affair. Bart gives up the majority of the house, living only in a small bedroom/bathroom compound that he is able to blockade on the third floor. Not only has Bart come to consider the majority of the house as belonging to neither himself nor the rat, becoming a kind of NoMan’s Land, but he has abandoned the sophisticated configuration of the human home for a more rat-like warren. Since his compound does not include the kitchen, he does not cook, but instead forages for ready-to-eat foods at the grocery store or prepared by others at

the microgeography of infestation in relationship spaces 311 restaurants. Further, he no longer observes such niceties as trash cans, simply pushing his waste out of the window like a rat. One of the key points to securing Bart’s “fortress,” his bedroom/ bathroom compound, is a hole in the wall around the radiator pipe. In his haste to secure this area, he grabbed whatever was ready to hand, a stack of “heavy art books.”29 In doing so, he symbolically reduces human culture to nest wadding, and like a rat uses materials based on their physical composition, rather than any aesthetic or cultural connections. His use of the art books is also indicative of his growing contempt of property conventions, as he does not realize their significance until later: “[The rat] was trying to dig her way through the art books. They were [Bart’s wife’s] cherished possessions, rare, painstakingly collected over the years. She would be outraged to have them ruined. He never should have used them to block the hole. Stupid of him. Yet there had been nothing else at hand.”30 Here all concerns of property have yielded to utility and he does not even consider moving the books. They are an essential part of his fortress, and other concerns are secondary. And it is like an extra-marital affair: giving the property of the wife to the other woman. As the battle grows in intensity, and his increasing rat-ness make him less fit for human companionship, Bart finds himself less desirous of company and more of the rugged solitary life of a vermin. Initially, Bart seeks help and advice from everyone about rats, even those unlikely to have good information are interrogated for every morsel of knowledge. He goes not only to the handyman of a nearby apartment building, but also asks his plumber, his boss, the drugstore cashier, the owners of a nearby café, and the representatives of the home security firm that he mistook for burglars. As he grows more rat-like, he proceeds to lie, because “The rat was no one’s business but his, and he intended to keep it that way.”31 He tells other people that he’s killed the rat, except for his wife, who would then expect him to visit her in Maine, whom he tells that he is working with an exterminator, a professional. These lies turn the conflict into an illicit affair. Throughout the novel, Bart’s search for the rat’s home has been unsuccessful. Finally, he decides to put a trap in his daughters’ dollhouse

29 30 31

Chauncey G. Parker, III. The Visitor (New York: Signet, 1981), 177. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 194.

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in the basement, but when he opens the house’s back, he startles the rat, who then runs “out the front door.”32 Bart is also startled, and drops the house’s hinged back. Here we see a typical confrontation between homeowner and vermin, in which both are startled, and both flee, but which is which is inverted. The rat runs through the house’s door, which indicates her ownership and mastery, while Bart was entering (and exited) through a hole in the wall, exactly the way a verminous creature would. Further, when Bart is startled, he accidentally triggers the rat-trap he is holding and it snaps down on his fingers, catching him. Now that Bart has become a vermin he is able to engage the rat in a violent battle as equals, finally matching and killing her. By killing the rat, Bart has not only eliminated the vermin, but has also chosen to return to his wife and child, who return home soon after. The victory of the human in this novel is nominal as it came through Bart’s transformation, a transformation that continues after the rat’s death. Bart sells his home, thus yielding the field of battle and conceding a draw with the animal nature inside him. The Other Side In contrast to texts of conflict, which focus on the destructive and contaminating nature of vermin, texts of cooperation represent the animals as being no less powerful, but as being creatures of rejuvenation that bring life from death. The 1996 film Joe’s Apartment is a fable of social rejuvenation through the natural cycle of death, decomposition, and rebirth. As advocates of “shit,” roaches preside over this cycle because they alone can see the vital link between decomposition processes and rebirth. The movie uses “shit,” in a broadly metaphorical way, the way we might use other terms like Dick’s “kipple,” the generic “garbage,” or the more technical “detritus,” and I will use it in a similarly broad sense. In Joe, the roaches find a kindred spirit, a man not uncomfortable living in shit, which leads to an immediate, and unprecedented, alliance between humankind and roachdom. However, this initial alliance is tenuous, and it is only at the film’s conclusion that both sides are able to form a stable union based on the holiness of the procreative act as the road to renewal for all species.

32

Ibid., 190.

the microgeography of infestation in relationship spaces 313 We are introduced to death as a side product of Joe’s search for his first apartment in New York City. An innocent college graduate from Iowa, Joe believes he can find an inexpensive apartment quickly, but as he fails he runs into a man lying on the sidewalk with his brains splattered. When Joe pauses to help, the man rises, and later introduces himself as Walter Shit, providing us with a preview of the movie’s method and motive. Walter is a concept artist, and he made himself up to appear dead and lay on the street until someone offered to help him in order to “express how cold, how pitiless this city really is.” Though Walter’s art is cruel and manipulative, feeding off the suffering of others, he expresses a hope that someone is watching, and that his art might awaken forces for change. Walter awakens these forces when he persuades Joe to pretend to be the son of the woman who died in his arms, murdered by real estate business thugs, the elderly Mrs. Growtowski, and thereby become the heir to her rent-controlled apartment. This apartment is not only infested, it is indwelt by roaches. When visible, they scurry across the ground in a mixture of computer-generated, stop-motion animated, and live forms, but when out of sight, the roaches speak through the objects that provide their cover. A variety of dirty clothes, discarded food, and religious bric-a-brac actually speak to Joe. The roaches become not merely residents of the apartment, but its spirit. Upon first meeting the cockroaches, Joe calls them the most greasy and disgusting bugs he’s ever seen, but does not attempt to squish them and earns their immediate affection by eating a piece of toast that had been occupied by a cockroach. The roaches come to Joe’s aid when the agents who more or less killed Mrs. Growtowski return. They reveal to him their ability to speak, to sing, and to dance in musical numbers. We learn that the agents are in the employ of one Senator Dougherty, who is attempting to remove the last tenants from the block to make room for the Manhattan Maximum Security Prison, which he touts as the largest in the world. A true monument, the seat of a repressive state apparatus, the movie makes it clear however that the prison is not merely the power of the global seeking to “colonize and oppress” Manhattan’s East Village, but is the result of a misunderstanding of the cycle of death and rebirth. The senator laments of his beloved East Village, “How could it decay so fast that the only thing that’ll sprout in its soil is a jail?” However, the true path to rejuvenation becomes clear when Joe is invited into Walter’s band “Shit” as a drummer, even though he does

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not know how to play, and is sent out to post notices of a performance. While posting the black-and-white posters that say simply “Shit,” Joe runs into Lily, his love interest and coincidentally the daughter of Senator Dougherty, whom he had earlier witnessed in her alleyway garden. She has seen the desolation of his block and is posting notices encouraging local residents to contribute to the transformation of the block into a huge garden and community center. Visually, the meeting reenacts the film’s central message. On the left, Joe stands by his wall, covered with shit, while on the right Lily stands by her wall covered with brightly-colored pictures of the flowery notices she is posting. At the center is the corner, the meeting place between man and woman, shit and flower, the moment where death becomes life again. Although Joe and Lily ostensibly understand this connection, Joe reveals that he, as MTV Everyman, is still unable to appreciate and embrace the value of shit qua shit, or to see its connection with the vital animal forces that underlie human rituals such as writing a love letter. When Joe writes that he wants to help Lily with her garden, a roach over his shoulder shouts, “Tell her you want to plow her.” His metaphor is crude, and in line with the roaches’ visibly lascivious culture in the movie, but it speaks to the point that Joe cannot see: his desire for Lily is sexual, and is a natural extension of his life in the city following from Mrs. Growtowski’s death. To help Lily with her garden, Joe begins to collect shit from all around the city, but in order to truly understand, he must go beyond merely collecting it or even merely living in it: he must become shit. The movie’s middle section shows Joe becoming embroiled in shit. He collects it as fertilizer for Lily’s garden and lives in the apartment still spattered with the residuum of Mrs. Growtowski’s life. He also gets a job for the urinal cake producer P.I. Smith & Sons, in used product retrieval for the research department. Worn down by work and by the thought that Lily already has a boyfriend, Joe declares, “My life has totally turned to shit.” Joe’s acceptance is not sufficient, however, and when he performs for Walter’s band, he is publicly called out by the shit-meister himself, who reveals that the gig is simply another piece of performance art. After Joe performs his best attempt at drumming, Walter points to him and says, “I’m sorry. There won’t be any rock and roll tonight. This is all that’s left. This feeble, wimped-out death-rattle is all that’s left of the rolling thunder of America’s heart-beat.” Although Joe is discouraged, the roaches are not. In the movie, the roaches are mediators of the passage from decay to rebirth. In response

the microgeography of infestation in relationship spaces 315 to Joe’s declaration about his life, one of the roaches says, “Funny thing about shit—good things tend to grow out of it,” and, sure enough, a rare Indian flower has bloomed in the bag of shit Joe collected for Lily’s garden. Directly following the scene in which Joe is called out as the residuum of America’s once-vibrant musical life, the roaches engage in their most rousing number: “Funky Towel.” And, of course, the movie’s ultimate rejuvenation—the transformation of Joe’s block into a community garden, which leads to the solidification of Joe and Lily’s love—is effected by the roaches. However, to truly understand the significance of the movie’s climax, we must understand the roaches’ plot arc. Like most texts that focus on cockroaches, Joe’s Apartment emphasizes their dominance of the earth, but unlike most, Joe’s Apartment seeks to represent an amicable relationship between the human and blatta worlds. From the opening scene where a cockroach atop the Statue of Liberty claims the city, to a cockroach’s affi rmation that “Roaches will be crawling on the daisy popping out of the last rotting human corpse,” we are made to understand that roaches are the true lords of the earth. However, the movie does not represent roaches as alien creatures. Instead, it stresses the commonality between humans and roaches, and, by implication all animal life. Roaches and humans are both sexual creatures, and they both embrace life and fear death, which leads them to throw their lot in with Joe. When the real estate agents come to kill Joe, the roaches realize, “If Joe gets greased, we’re next.” The roaches resist the agents first by swarming all over Joe’s face, creating a roach mask that inverts the common trope of verminous horror: the human face that tears apart to reveal the insect within seen in films such as The Fly (1986), The Nest (1988), Mimic (1997) and Men in Black (1997). By inverting this then-current trope, they show that we are not supposed to be horrified at the cockroaches, but we are to identify with them. In the movie, cockroaches have their own public-access television station, whose every parody harkens us to the underlying kinship we share with them. And in response to this kinship, the roaches seek to aid Joe in everything that he does. They help him find a job, and they try to help him in wooing Lily. Since the roaches do not understand the concept of privacy, they intervene at the most intimate moments. From passing Lily a glass of wine and a pretzel bite to riding her lipstick to offering Joe a condom, the roaches’ close presence ultimately ruins the moment, leading Joe and Lily to turn their backs on shit: Lily says that Joe’s block is only fit for a prison and Joe declares war on the roaches, confirming

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their attitude about humans. The film tells us that roaches can talk, but normally choose not to because “people squash first and ask questions later.” Thus, there has been no point in attempting communication because humans will always be too violent in opposition to roachkind. In response to Joe’s betrayal, the roaches almost give up on him, but decide instead to bring Lily’s dream of a garden to fruition. They bring Joe and Lily back together through the creation of the garden. Then they form their bodies into a message of love, a message that transforms Lily’s horror at roaches into a grudging acceptance in the context of the green life around her. A focus on the life-processes that unite all creatures of the earth leads to a cross-species alliance. The ubiquity of these life-processes is reinforced by the curious transformation of Senator Dougherty’s motives at the film’s end. When his plans for the Manhattan Maximum Security Prison are thwarted, he is not upset, but embraces the garden. This reversal is attributable partly to his love for his old neighborhood, and partly to a curious facet of his character. In an earlier scene, the Senator reveals that under his suit and shirt he wears a silk bustier, which he enjoys fondling when alone. Although this might seem a common trope suggesting the depravity of repressive members of government, its true nature is revealed at the film’s climax. When the Senator announces his support of the garden, he raises his hand high, revealing a spiked black leather bracer that he sheepishly pushes back into his shirt sleeve. The bracer is reminiscent of the garb worn by the cockroaches during the brief segment of “The No-Tell Roach Motel,” and reminds us that even senators are sexual beings. Becoming the Roach Bad Mojo is an award-winning role-playing game from 1996 that was re-released in 2004 in response to its cult popularity. Its plot and themes in many ways resemble those of Joe’s Apartment. Roger Samms (his name one of many allusions to The Metamorphosis in the game), is a hopelessly disempowered loner in a big city. His life has been shadowed by the death of his mother in giving birth to him, followed by his father giving him up for adoption. Focusing on the power of death, Samms fixated on cockroaches from a very young age. His fixation and deathfocus leads him to become a researcher in pesticides. However, Samms must learn that extermination is not the end toward which cockroaches,

the microgeography of infestation in relationship spaces 317 coprophages and detritivores, point us. Instead, he must see that cockroaches lead to the life that is beyond death, the life eternal. Samms is transformed into a cockroach, and it is our job, as players of the game, to navigate that cockroach through riddles and perils so that it can be transformed back into human form. Through a combination of writing and game design, Bad Mojo represents the spatialization and concretization of human social relations. These social relations have become hopelessly muddled by humans, and it is only through the power of the cockroach that they may be set right to start the beginning of a new life for Samms. In the game’s introduction, Samms describes himself as feeling “stepped on,” among the other insectoid metaphors for being powerless, but once he transforms into a cockroach, his powerlessness is gone. Among all the deaths available to the cockroach we pilot, being stepped on is not one of them. One cannot be stepped on because the human figures in the game are all dormant: Samms, whose body lies still on the floor once his consciousness is transferred into the cockroach body; Eddie, who falls asleep after drinking a beer in which a sleeping pill has been placed by our cockroach; and Angelina, Samms’ mother who speaks from beyond the grave but cannot act. In the absence of human agents, animals run the game. Not only cockroaches, but mice, rats, silverfish, spiders, moths, and even a deadly cat roam the bar that is the game’s setting. Although the creatures that roam Eddie’s Waterfront Bar are rendered with the most disgusting detail possible, they hold vital information, and in order to successfully navigate the game we must approach each of them, though each time we are shown the twittering antennae, the throbbing gut, even the glistening mucous of the creature to which we speak. We must extend what we have been told about our own character onto them: “Do not loathe your appearance: it is merely a mask through which truth may be conveyed.”33 This maxim is a significant inversion in two ways. First, like the cockroach mask scene in Joe’s Apartment, it inverts the horror trope of the insect concealed within the human. Second, it is an inversion of our expectation about masks, which typically conceal rather than reveal the truth. This inversion prepares us for

33 Vincent Carella and Phill Simon. Bad Mojo. 1996 (Weston, CT: Got Game Entertainment, 2004).

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the dynamic of the game, in which we abandon our human perspective in order to learn more about being human. In response to the limited RAM of systems at the time the game was programmed as well as to the conventions of role-playing games, the bar is divided into six levels, each of them localized in a room. These rooms are as Lafebvre describes built spaces: the concretization of particular social relations. The game accentuates this by localizing exposition, so that we learn certain parts of characters’ lives in certain places. In Eddie Blattito’s apartment, we learn the personal parts of Eddie’s life—his love for his wife and her tragic death in childbirth. In the bar, we learn a more public side to Eddie’s life—his attempts to manage a boxer, and his hopes for the success of the bar. In Samms’ living room, we see him as a bullied child, a loner still, though grown-up and successful. In his den, however, we learn of his internal response to the bullying, his tortured desire for mastery over his world. The concretion of relationships develops also through the peculiar system by which the game’s back story is communicated. Scattered throughout the bar are a number of significant objects, which, when approached by the cockroach, trigger short movies about the past lives of Eddie, Roger, and Angelina. Often these objects are photographs, and the movie plays within the bounds of the photograph, showing the figures portrayed either immediately before or after the photo was taken. The linking of the objects to the exposition transforms them from mere relics of the past into the past itself. Eddie gives us no account of his wife’s death. He is silenced by the sleeping pill we as cockroaches put in his beer. Instead, the box of cigars that he bought to celebrate the birth of his son—still full, not a single cigar smoked, but nonetheless undiscarded—speaks for him and to Roger-as-cockroach. Two levels in the game have virtually no exposition about the lives of the human subjects in the game. These rooms become, partly by absence and partly through an increased presence, essentially cockroach rooms: the bathroom and the kitchen. These rooms represent the base animal: eating and excreting. Only we visit them in reverse order: the bathroom first, then the kitchen, calling to mind how cockroaches serve as carriers of disease, also enacting the coprophagous nature of cockroaches. To them, this is not a reverse order at all, because to them feces are food, and it is in the passage between these two rooms that the cockroach becomes most powerfully a spirit that takes life from death. This passage is concretized into a physical journey that the cockroach takes,

the microgeography of infestation in relationship spaces 319 but that journey is itself determined by ancient traditions regarding the relationship of death and built space. Traditionally, doors are either inherently or by special ritual imbued with magic that repels death and prevents its entrance.34 For example, vampires must be invited before they can enter a home, and the angel of death is kept out by painting the lintels and post with blood at Passover. In some traditions, this is problematic, because in order to keep the magic potent, no dead body can be allowed to cross the threshold. Where this is true, a corpse door is used to transport the dead out of the home for burial.35 In Bad Mojo, the cockroach, as a spirit of death, is not allowed to cross the threshold. In the game, the magic comes in the form of Franz the cat, who is loose in the corridors of the bar. Whenever a roach wanders too near the door, he reaches a paw in and kills it. To successfully navigate the bar, we must find another way. These alternate routes become corpse-doors because they are entered through death. The first is entered over the cigar box which shows us Angelina’s death, but the second one is more complex, and begins our movement from death into life eternal. The route from the bathroom to the kitchen is guarded by a huge rat that eats any roaches that come near it. To pass through this way, the rat must die, a death that comes courtesy of a shower of discarded razor blades. Walking past the body of the roach triggers the appearance of the Oracle, the spirit of Roger’s dead mother, who tells us, “The rat king lies dead, and with it may your fear die as well. Fear is the great inhibitor you must conquer before you can cross the threshold.” And indeed we will not again get to go through a doorway until we have re-entered our human body. The statement of the Oracle stands in contrast to a later one, where she tells us, “Love can still flourish in the soil of death—this is the key to life eternal.” Thus, although fear dies, death becomes the very soil in which love flourishes—a formula similar to that of Joe’s Apartment. But unlike Joe’s Apartment, the property at the center of Bad Mojo is already a prison. The past has literally become the walls in the game-world, and the goal of the game is to escape. As the cockroach, we escape by the mechanism of small 34 W. H. Robinson. Urban Entomology: Insect and Mite Pests in the Human Environment (New York: Chapman & Hall, 1996), 4. 35 Lord Fitzroy Raglan. The Temple and the House (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1964), 32.

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things, achieving through the agency of cockroach what humans could not achieve alone. In all these texts, vermin, by inserting themselves into the physical space inhabited by humans, are also simultaneously inserting themselves into human relations. In the competitive model, humans and vermin compete over control of space, and whether humans or vermin “win,” the conflict plays itself out at least partly as a sexual struggle in which one of them must be eliminated. These texts end with death. On the other hand, cooperative texts highlight the coprophagous nature of vermin, a characteristic akin to bringing life from death, and through this achieve what Lefebvre says is the ideal of habiting: “Even the most derisive everyday existence retains a trace of grandeur and spontaneous poetry.”36 Thus, although experts in integrated pest management may describe infestations in terms of their “aesthetic injury levels,”37 vermin are shown to have their own unique beauty.

36

Lefebvre, 83. Gary L. Piper and Gordon W. Frankie. “Integrated Pest Management of Urban Cockroach Populations.” In Perspectives in Urban Entomology, ed. G. W. Frankie and C. S. Koehler, (New York: Academic P, 1978), 253. 37

CROSSING OVER: DISABILITY, CONTINGENT AGENCY, AND DEATH IN THE MARGINAL GENRE WORK OF TEMPLE GRANDIN AND JIM HARRISON Ryan Hediger The Introduction to this volume, following (dis)ability theory more generally and Jacques Derrida in particular, proposes an understanding of agency that is less absolute, that is more partial and circumstantially constrained than traditional accounts. Sarah E. McFarland and I suggest that the idea of agency itself suffers from being too categorically dependent; it is often too strictly connected to inaccurate, merely conventional definitions of humanity, and to the cluster of associated in-category attributes. Our approach foregrounds the human self ’s weakness and mortality, thereby complicating the category “human” and unsettling notions of selfhood, intelligence, action, language, and so on, which cannot finally be separated from agency.1 Once the automatic connections among “humanity,” “agency,” and especially “language” are brought under scrutiny, nonhuman forms of agency, as indicated by body movements or the like, can appear, as many essays in this collection show.2 In short, McFarland and I refute the idea that only humans display agency, urging instead that nonhuman forms of agency can appear when we adjust our ways of perceiving it to particular scenarios—context—and to different forms of life. Clearly in such an argument, issues of naming or categories—what they mean, how they function, what they do to our attitudes about sheer reality—are very much at issue. This chapter applies and extends such an approach by considering two authors whose work contests identity-bound notions of agency. Temple Grandin’s nonfiction life narrative as it appears in various texts and Jim Harrison’s novella “The Beast God Forgot to Invent”

1 See the opening of our Introduction, where we discuss the ultimately limitless string of terms that connect back to notions of agency. 2 See Warkentin, Scott, Lulka, Rowe, Onion, and Bishop in this volume for cogent examples of such bodily displays of animal agency. Indeed, in one form or another, every essay in this volume investigates questions of body movement and agency.

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display the unusual capacities of two ostensibly disabled people who are likened to animals.3 I deliberately commit a minor indiscretion of genre by coupling these texts, when one is “fictional” while the other is “nonfictional,” to interrogate the function of these two categories, as we will see below.4 Grandin, who has autism, argues her visual mode of thinking allows her to better understand nonhuman animals, since they are often visual in a similar way. Conversely, Harrison’s main character, Joe, suffers a traumatic brain injury in a motorcycle accident that makes him lose, to quote Harrison, “most of his ability at visual memory.”5 Harrison’s narrative thus shows Joe becoming marginalized and animalized by his condition, and eventually drowning. Joe’s death can at first seem tragic in ways that recapitulate stereotypical notions of disability and animality as tragic. Grandin’s narrative, on the other hand, centers on her heroic rise to human prominence by overcoming some difficulties resulting from autism. With these trajectories, both texts meditate on the categories “human” and “animal,” and on the notion of agency. I argue that these texts upset traditional hierarchies of ability and agency by presenting ostensibly disabled people who are explicitly animal-like and who, precisely because of their marginal human identities, actually display exceptional insights and capacities. These two narratives demonstrate that agency, whether human or nonhuman, can only ever appear in particular contexts, and that any ascription of agency must rigorously attend to the relationship between agent and context. When interpretation of action or text is localized this way, agency becomes situational and contingent, as do conceptions of subjectivity. This weaker form of subjectivity puts conventional hierarchies—subject/object, active/passive, human/animal—into potential doubt as well. As McFarland and I—again following Derrida—argue in the Introduction to this volume, there are a host of terms associated with

3 See Temple Grandin, with Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005) and Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from my Life with Autism (New York: Vintage, 1996). And see Jim Harrison, “The Beast God Forgot to Invent,” in The Beast God Forgot to Invent (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 1–97. 4 See Jacques Derrida’s challenging landmark study that connects matters of genre to other categorical systems like gender, law, taxonomy, and so on: “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (autumn 1980): 55–81. 5 Harrison, 6.

crossing over: (dis)ability, contingent agency, and death 323 “agency,” and the affiliations among those terms cannot finally be separated. We note that the crucial categorical distinction between humans and animals has often been connected to the ability to become a subject by way of knowledge—the “as such” of the world and of death. This essay troubles that ability by questioning categories connected to it and synonomous with it—ability, agency. In effect, this essay adds the pair of opposed terms abled/disabled to the list above, connecting them with questions of agency. The case of disability is important in this context because, even in ordinary understandings, it recasts agency as something like a continuum rather than as a category in which one either resides or does not. Agency is not fixed or absolute; it is contingent. For example, Harrison satirizes the notion of a writer’s authority over story and interrogates many familiar measures of individual agency such as identity, memory, and labor, finding his animalized human Joe to have more agency in some respects than the “normal” character Norman. Indeed, Harrison’s story reminds us that highly conventional expressions of agency like labor can often become robotic, sheer mechanism. And Grandin’s exceptional abilities with animals become clear to readers precisely because she mixes forms of writing and expression, drawing from scientific discourse, personal memoir, and visual media. Her unique form of agency, in other words, requires a new, hybrid genre of conveyance to demonstrate it, exemplifying how traditional forms of writing and knowledge can obscure forms of agency that do not fit neatly into given, often narrowly anthropocentric patterns. Grandin’s hybrid form of writing, for example, shows how her identification with, rather than authority over, nonhuman animals greatly improves her scientific and practical insights about them. That personal, narrative element of her approach to animals would likely not even come into view within other genre frameworks. This hybrid approach contrasts, for example, with the scientific paper, which privileges objective, distant, and reproducible forms of knowing, a powerful, valuable, but imperfect form, like all other types of writing in their ways, as McFarland and I claim in the volume Introduction. Grandin’s personal success in the face of autism registers in her appearances across various popular media. As her webpage reports, she has been featured on a variety of television programs, from 20/20 to CNN’s Larry King Live to The Today Show. She has also been featured in the New York Times, in People magazine, and in many other media

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venues.6 A brief version of her personal credo was heard on the National Public Radio program This I Believe, which has also been published in book form. In most of these cases, she signifies the ability to overcome difficulties. She thus epitomizes admirable agency and simultaneously therefore deconstructs conventional ideas of agency, since her ability exists precisely due to her differences from its conventional forms. Central to Grandin’s story is the fact that her apparently “natural” estrangement from language—autistic people often have linguistic difficulties—has been profoundly enabling regarding animals. She says, for example, in opening her recent book Animals in Translation, that “Autism made school and social life hard, but it made animals easy.”7 She returns to this theme throughout the book, describing how she began to have “a reputation for having practically a magic connection to animals.”8 She notes feeling “mystified by these situations” because the answers to animal managers’ problems seemed “so obvious” to her: “It took me fifteen years to figure out that other people actually couldn’t see what the problem was, at least not without a lot of training and practice. They couldn’t see it because they weren’t visually oriented the way animals and autistic people are.”9 At this moment in the text, Grandin uses a personal observation to open an extended, interdisciplinary or cross-generic discussion of what it means for humans and nonhuman animals to see, drawing on numerous scientific studies as well as personal experiences. An upshot of this discussion is that the human development of larger frontal lobes in the brain, the neomammalian brain, makes humans good at generalizing, at reasoning, and at language, but less acutely aware of sensory experiences. This neomammalian portion of the brain is shared by all primates, but it seems to be most developed in humans, so that “humans make rapid generalizations from one situation to another; animals don’t.”10 She points out that autism interrupts the function of the frontal lobes, meaning that “Autistic people are closer to animals than normal people are.”11

6 Temple Grandin. “Who is Dr. Temple Grandin?” Dr. Temple Grandin’s Website. Viewed 30 March 2008. . 7 Grandin and Johnson, 1. 8 Grandin and Johnson, 24. 9 Grandin and Johnson, 24, original emphasis. 10 Grandin and Johnson, 52–55. 11 Grandin and Johnson, 57, original emphasis.

crossing over: (dis)ability, contingent agency, and death 325 This may sound like the conventional hierarchy of brain function and intelligence that universalizes a humanist notion of ability, with humans on top of course. But these scientific points about the neo-mammalian brain, when housed in Grandin’s personal narrative, reverse their hierarchical significance. Grandin’s self-professed proximity to animals gives her special powers, indeed powers that seem nearly magical to other humans; she applies her ordinary sensory experiences to animal problems in a way that seems easy and natural to her but impossible to others. This attribute is perhaps clearest as we read her narratives about solving problems in cattle operations. In one such case, the operators of a new cattle-handling facility were on the verge of tearing it down and rebuilding because the cattle refused to enter the handling area. Grandin explains that when she arrived there as a consultant, it took her “ten minutes” to figure out the problem. For her, it seemed very simple. The alley into the handling area was too dark: “The cattle were supposed to walk from broad daylight into an unlit indoor alley, and the contrast in illumination was too sharp. They were afraid to walk into pitch-black space.”12 Furthermore, the solution, Grandin writes, was simple and literally right in front of the operators’ eyes: they simply had to open a big door on the backside of the barn so there was more light inside, reducing the contrast between inside and out. The cows commenced to walk right into the handling area for their inoculations. Grandin also describes resolving the mystery of her friend Jane’s cat, who can anticipate Jane’s arrival home every day, waiting for her by the door. The answer to this particular mystery, Grandin explains, is that the cat probably hears her friend’s voice when she greets the elevator operator. Grandin tells this story in terms of her own visual thinking process, essentially writing a script of the movie in her mind: A new image flashed into my head. I created an elevator with an operator for my mother’s building. To make the image I used the same method people use in computer graphics. I pulled an image of my mother’s elevator out of memory and combined it with an image of the elevator operator I saw one time at the Ritz in Boston. He had white gloves and a black tuxedo. I lifted the brass elevator control panel and its tuxedoed operator from my Ritz memory file and placed them inside my mother’s elevator.13

12 13

Grandin and Johnson, 22. Grandin and Johnson, 59.

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Grandin’s ability to translate between species, genre, and media leads directly to her intellectual solution to the cat question, upsetting any kind of notion of ability as categorically pure. In other words, ability derives precisely from her marginal position with regard to these categories. Furthermore, the fact that Grandin co-authored this book and this passage in some difficult-to-define fashion with Catherine Johnson accents the partial and translational form of Grandin’s particular expression of agency in authorship. The paragraph that follows the one just cited, naming Grandin’s answer to the mystery of the cat and the elevator, presents the differences between Jane’s view and the cat’s view as ontological: That was the answer. The fact that Jane’s building had an elevator operator provided that cat with the sound of Jane’s voice while Jane was still down on the first floor. That’s why the cat went to the door to wait. The cat wasn’t predicting Jane’s arrival; for the cat Jane was already home.14

Jane does not see herself as home until she enters the door. But in the cat’s experience of reality, Jane is home when her voice sounds below in the elevator. Further, Grandin’s ability to discern the explanation using her visual mind appears ontologically different from Jane’s way of thinking, or nearly so, locating her in a hybrid stance between “human” and “animal.” Grandin’s and the cat’s abilities appear in this case precisely because of Grandin’s cross-species attention and her mixing of genres. She can narrate her experiences here so that they become legible to “normal” readers because with work and patience Grandin has learned to inhabit the human linguistic world, thus the title’s notion of “translation.” In such a context, where her personal narrative cohabits with these other genres, we feel also the justification for what Oliver Sacks describes in the Foreword to Grandin’s book Thinking in Pictures: “the sense of language as an almost miraculous power by which she might gain some mastery over herself, some contact with others, some intercourse with the world.”15 Sacks announces the book as “in a way, unthinkable” prior to its existence, which in literary circles echoes the highest kind of praise for the author/maker.16

14

Grandin and Johnson, 59. Oliver Sacks, “Foreword,” Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from my Life with Autism (New York: Vintage, 1996), xv. 16 Sacks, xiii. 15

crossing over: (dis)ability, contingent agency, and death 327 But Sack’s praise is itself problematic in ways pertinent to this essay’s argument. Though he has been positioned here as the ostensibly objective judge of Grandin and her work, in fact his discourse and therefore his objectivity proves uneven. He first writes of her “incapacity for evasion or artifice of any kind” on one page, then remarks on Grandin’s “capacity for humor and even subterfuge which one would have thought impossible in someone who is autistic” only two pages later.17 That word “incapacity” seems to recapitulate the conventional views of someone like Grandin, even though the whole purpose of the book Sacks introduces is to upset or problematize such views. I do not mean to blame Sacks for this so much as to show that Grandin’s story repeatedly makes clear how much an enabling context can affect what seem to be a being’s “abilities.” And this notion of context as enabling or disabling upsets the possibility of objectivity and of some universal notion of ability or agency. Changing the contexts of nonhuman animal lives, for example, has led to surprising nonhuman uses of human languages, as with Koko the gorilla and many others, and to suggestions like that of Savage-Rumbaugh, Rumbaugh, and Fields, mentioned in the Introduction. They believe “many limitations expressed by the animal subjects to date are the limitations of our methods, not those of the subjects themselves.”18 Next to Grandin’s narrative, the genre of Harrison’s “The Beast God Forgot to Invent” can at first seem more traditional. It is a fictional novella built around an epistolary frame story. It consists of the narrator’s letter to a coroner describing all he knew of Joe, the character mentally disabled in the motorcycle accident who has drowned in Lake Superior. Yet, Harrison’s use of the highly conventional epistolary form appears as gentle satire or even a mockery of that device. For one, it morbidly and self-consciously positions readers as coroners, emphasizing the problems of representation that the story foregrounds throughout. That is, this story keenly emphasizes the difficulty of narrating the ineffable vitality of life with language. Harrison generalizes and underscores this point when he remarks, at the opening of the story’s

17

Sacks, xv, xvii. E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Duane M. Rumbaugh, and William M. Fields, “Language as a Window on Rationality,” in Rational Animals, ed. Susan Hurley and Matthew Nudds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 541. 18

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second section: “Maybe all writers telling a story are in fact doing a coroner’s inquest?”19 Harrison’s metafictional purpose is clarified by the deliberate and repeated exposure of cracks in the story’s framing structure and therefore genre, when Harrison himself seems to speak in place of his narrator in something like the “free indirect discourse” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. finds in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Gates shows that Hurston’s narrative voice “shifts back and forth between her ‘literate’ narrator’s voice and a highly idiomatic black voice” in “passages of free indirect discourse.”20 Gates argues that these changes indicate a sophisticated sense of double identity and of modernist style. While idiom is less at issue in Harrison, identity and the objectivity of narrative are very much in question (as is true in Hurston). Harrison’s story opens with one such fracture in the story’s framework, which includes a seeming digression about reading and “academic life” that Harrison explains is “neither specifically here nor there to our story” but which elaborates the story’s larger purpose as a cautionary tale about becoming too dominated by narrowly professional or civilizational concerns.21 At the very moment this text establishes its generic identity, then, it upsets it by arguing against generic thinking in general: the hermetically sealed “fictional” text is punctured by an awareness of the real world, modeling for readers how story crosses over into lived reality and vice-versa. Such generic indecision ruptures pure categorical thinking. Fiction here does not remain outside the domain of reality; fiction is not purely itself. And that categorical rupture carries over to many other forms of sorting reality in this book. Knowledge of others—their nature, their agency, and so on—itself becomes problematic without easy resort to fixed systems of understanding, as we see in the first portions of the story in particular, where the narrator persists in telling short anecdotes about his own life rather than about Joe, breaking with his ostensible purpose. After several such digressions, the narrator explains these moves: “Right now I’m trying to describe the change in my perceptions that allowed me to unequivocally understand what happened to Joe.

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Harrison, 35. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Afterword: “Zora Neale Hurston: ‘A Negro Way of Saying,’ ” in Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Perennial, 1990), 203. 21 Harrison, 3. 20

crossing over: (dis)ability, contingent agency, and death 329 I daresay no one else understands more than the part of the story that is directly contiguous to them.”22 The narrator is admitting that only by scrutinizing his own changes wrought by contact with Joe can he truly “understand” Joe’s changes. This view establishes the impossibility of an objective account of Joe and therefore justifies the fictional form that enters in place of the juri-medical account called for by the officer of the state, the coroner. In other words, Harrison’s narrative is partly a justification for fiction, for an account that includes detail, emotion, sensory experience, and the like, implying that another genre, another type of account, could not adequately present the complex case of Joe, much as the technical paper could not convey an account of Grandin’s experience and agency. But Harrison’s narrative, like Grandin’s, refuses to rest neatly in its identity as story. This point is emphasized by Harrison’s suggestion that the story is elaborated along unnecessary lines for an audience it also at least jestingly denies. In one of the many asides delivered by the narrator to the coroner, Harrison writes, “It’s unlikely that anyone but the two of us will see this report.”23 In one sense this detail is merely consistent with the generic framework Harrison has established—it is a letter to the coroner. But the narrator’s claim is also clearly untrue ultimately, since this account has been published as the eponymous story in a commercially well-reviewed collection. The claim is thus a self-deprecating, falsely modest joke and a point about the relative unimportance of writing. The narrative is therefore a highly public text masquerading as an invisible as well as monstrous form of speech, a beast, dramatizing the book’s anti-identity tendencies. It is monstrous because it is consistently breaks with its ostensible formal guidelines; its real identity is not its stated identity. The text’s own generic identity, divided against itself, signals the account of ontological and identity systems in the story in general. For instance, the narrator initially introduces himself effacingly, as indifferent to his own life: “Before I forget, yes I do forget who I am, no longer a matter of particular interest to me, my name is Norman Arnz and I’m sixty-seven years old.”24 A few pages subsequent to this introduction, the narrator reinforces his point, offering that

22 23 24

Harrison, 26. Harrison, 20. Harrison, 4.

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“I am scarcely interesting even to myself.”25 In this way, Norman’s subjectivity becomes not a mode of confirming the self in its sameness, but of forgetting the self, opening himself to Joe and, via Joe as proxy, to the wild vitality of (ultimately) unnamable life. 26 Since, structurally, the narrator stands in for readers, Norman’s anti-identity stance can be understood as a model for readers in general. The narrator’s anti-identity feeling heightens his interest in Joe’s narrative and establishes a status for narrative that undermines “normal” selfhood and “normal” agency. Harrison’s name for his narrator, “Norman”—Norm—evoking the terms “norm” and “normal,” reiterates the plot’s effect of undermining normalcy via the person of Norman. If this story works, it does so because we identify in part with the stranger of the scenario, Joe, and surrender part of our agency as we read. Identification or at least fascination with the primary characters in a narrative is conventional to fiction, of course, but Harrison makes this scenario uncommonly significant. The story asks us, in multiple and complex ways, to identify with its disabled character, and it connects us to him via a monstrous form. Reading means inhabiting the monstrous text, putting readers into an ambivalent position, a marginal and unstable identity position. We follow Joe. So, in this story’s metafictional function, Harrison suggests that reading is exactly entering into an ambivalence of identity; reading is a break with identity order. The marginal readerly position, especially in the context of this story’s disability theme, resembles the position of the “disabled” figure. The anxiety that often surrounds disabled figures, Rosemarie Garland Thomson argues, derives largely from how their very presence disturbs systems of meaning and order, too often leading to their dehumanization.27 Thomson asserts that the disabled figure upsets the “absolute categories” with which we structure experience, such as ethnicity, ability, and humanity.28 She also shows how the case of the 25

Harrison, 13. There is additional slippage between the subject and object of the story, insofar as Harrison himself has much in common with Joe, including his practice of long walks over difficult terrain, his interest in and practice of hunting, and his sense of not fitting into the contemporary moment. See for instance Charles McGrath, “Pleasures of the Hard-Worn Life: An Interview with Jim Harrison,” The New York Times, “Books,” Jan 25, 2007, . 27 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 28 Thomson, 34. 26

crossing over: (dis)ability, contingent agency, and death 331 disabled raises fundamental questions about “the ideology of liberal individualism.” The democratic state founded upon liberal individualism depends upon notions of self-government, self-determination, autonomy, and progress. Such a selfimage parallels the national ideal in an individualist egalitarian democracy that each citizen is a microcosm of the nation as a whole. A well-regulated self thus contributes to a well-regulated nation.29

Thomson shows that the disabled figure demonstrates the “fantasy” of such pure subjective agency, since it is impossible for anyone to have complete self-determination.30 Martha Nussbaum’s recasting of the social contract tradition in her book Frontiers of Justice is driven by a similar insight about liberal individualism. In light of such cases as disability and animals, Nussbaum argues that we must not understand the social pursuit of justice as centered on the ability of equals to agree upon a mutually beneficial contract. Rather, she insists justice ought to be rendered by considering the particular abilities and needs of many diverse forms of life.31 Thomson’s argument persistently shows ways in which the marginal position of the disabled figure actually resembles the position of the so-called normal person, and this idea functions centrally in Harrison’s story as well. For instance, Harrison upsets and often reverses the categories of abled and disabled. After Joe’s accident, he performs a number of physical feats—traveling great distances over difficult terrain, attracting the attention of numerous women, removing telemetric devices from wild animals, and so on—feats that question his “disabled” status and demonstrate a strange form of agency, much like Grandin’s. Conversely, the reader’s proxy and the figure of normality, Norman, repeatedly appears as somewhat disabled in important and importantly ordinary ways: he can only imagine sharing Joe’s prowess for navigating the forest;32 he writes of feeling miserably depressed from his excessively urban lifestyle, relying on the sight of the river as a cure;33 and despite the story’s insistent references to the narrator’s sexual desires, for example, during the one instance when he does have intercourse, 29

Thomson, 42. Thomson, 42. 31 Nussbaum, Martha. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006). 32 Harrison, e.g. 64–65. 33 Harrison, 23–24. 30

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the narrator notes his experience of “pain that shot through my prostate like a hot hat pin.” If this were not sign enough of inhibited “normal” function, the narrator includes several self-deprecating jokes about his sexual performance in this same section.34 Of course, there are some clear ways in which Joe’s new abilities also include new disabilities, but often Harrison takes such disabilities as opportunities to critique contemporary American culture, highlighting how context-dependent agency is. Early on, for example, Harrison remarks that Joe “had lost his functional intelligence or that part of it most valued in society, his ability to make a living.” He had little “chance to return to what we wanly call a normal life,” but this had its benefit in permitting him “to spend a life as a free-roaming primate.”35 Joe’s affiliation with animality at this moment is characteristic of the book, and it frees him from a mundane role in the economy. Such an ordinary economic role is satirized with Norman whose work life, when recalled, becomes a vague memory of “shuffling papers, file cabinets opening and closing, . . . the yawn or cough from my secretary. . . .”36 Such blandness in the completion of labor reiterates questions about the degree to which work demonstrates agency; Norman seems to perform a pre-made role, while Joe seems more an agent in several respects. Joe’s animal affiliation aligns with Thomson’s readings of Ahab in Melville’s classic Moby Dick. Thomson identifies him as a “whale-made man,” noting the contrast between this animal-marked account of subjectivity and the fantastic notions of self-made, self-controlled, purely agential subjectivity discussed above as central to liberal democracy.37 Harrison accents these fundamental questions about self-control posed by the figure of the disabled with additional parodies of conventional subjectivity. For example, Norman claims at one point, “I had long since evolved a system wherein I was always right but of late there have been tremors where the very concepts of right and wrong in the conduct of one’s life” had become unsettled.38 Somewhat later, Norman emphasizes this point: “Maybe the world doesn’t really look like the one I’ve been seeing all along. That was one of the questions Joe [implicitly] offered.” Joe’s case has struck to the core of Norman’s

34 35 36 37 38

Harrison, 76–77. Harrison, 29. Harrison, 20. Thomson, 44. Harrison, 50.

crossing over: (dis)ability, contingent agency, and death 333 very ideas of reality. Further unsettling the function of self-control in subjectivity, Norman admits that he might not have been receptive to Joe and his condition had he not been in “a state of vulnerability” in which his “interest in life at large seemed to be evaporating.”39 Joe’s radically different mode of inhabiting the world answers to Norman’s malaise, provoking his interest and his narrative. To the extent that Norman displays ability in narrating his tale of Joe, then, that ability grows not out of assertive selfhood so much as a weak, listless selfhood, open to different forms of life that end up further rattling his very ideas of the world. And ultimately Joe provokes in Norman and all those who care about Joe a feeling of “powerlessness” to help him.40 Agency in this—actually quite ordinary—scenario proves partial and contingent. In other words, Joe’s ostensibly disabled yet vital form of life foregrounds the ordinary weakness of mortal life in the “normal” crowd. This account, empowering the “disabled” and showing the weakness of those who are “normal,” recasts the relationship between these categories. The story goes beyond being a melancholic tale of how we are exposed to the risk of injury, impairment, disability—Harrison remarks for example how “The sheer numbers of the injured, of course, reflected the frequency of auto and motorcycle accidents”—it becomes a tale of “envy” of Joe’s essential wildness, his animality, his uniqueness.41 Most particularly, it is a tale expressing envy of Joe’s departure from what the first sentence declares is the danger of civilization: that one will waste life on “nonsense.”42 Thus, while Norman sympathizes with Joe, he does not condescendingly pity him. Neither is this scenario a simple reversal in which the other becomes romanticized sentimentally or unrealistically, because Norm’s sympathy for Joe centers on their real, common mortality, despite superficial differences. A key passage taking up this issue expresses Norman’s sympathy with regard to both Joe and a baby bear Joe had buried: “Sentimental tears formed but perhaps this sort of mourning really isn’t sentimental.” These tears indicate a pathos that is appropriate because their cause is serious and real. Moreover, as Harrison continues to justify his narrator’s tears, he explicitly closes the gap between humans and animals: “As a geezer I had a perfect right to empathize 39 40 41 42

Harrison, 72. Harrison, 83. Harrison, 17, 21. Harrison, 3.

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with a creature [a dead baby bear] whose life was truncated barely past its beginning. Mortality indeed. We’re always standing on a trapdoor with wobbly hinges.”43 It is clear in this context, furthermore, that Joe’s life, also truncated prematurely, is a referent of these mourning tears. Throughout the novella, the narrator’s pathos, borne partly out of self-conscious weakness, steers the story between two areas of error, sentimentality or machismo, which is potentially surprising given the superficially masculinist tone and themes of motorcycle accidents, forest rambles, hyper-sexuality, and so on. This awareness of weakness and mortality is central to the story’s revisions of many of our inherited categories of understanding, along many of the same lines traced by Thomson above. For instance, Harrison generalizes the story’s resistance to genre identity to apply to species and nature more broadly. Standing in the forest looking at the “dozen or so species of trees in the vicinity,” Norman thinks, “None were perfect or near-perfect specimens of their kind.” A few sentences later Norman proclaims, “There are no perfect trees any more than there are perfect human beings,” making a general point about the narrative of unusual Joe.44 Crucially, the book’s sustained argument for particularity and against generalization or rigid categorization underlies the narrator’s deep sympathy with others, whom he refuses to see as either absolutely different or as measurable against some pure standard. Joe’s story also underscores readers’ own universally impending disability of death. In this way, Joe is not so other, since the reality of death intrudes upon readers as an unknowable truth of our lives, not a fiction, enacting a minor violence on our subjectivities that undermines absolute readerly agency and the very possibility of such agency. The strange truth of death, our knowledge of death, is often taken as the foundation of our humanity, for instance in Heidegger’s influential account.45 Human ability and agency are founded on this self-consciousness, which is taken also to distinguish humans from animals. In this view, we are subjects because we know death; we grasp death as such. Yet, as the Introduction to this volume shows, and as Leonard Lawlor 43

Harrison, 50. Harrison, 49. 45 See Derrida’s extensive discussion and deconstruction of Heidegger’s view of death in The Animal That Therefore I Am, especially 160, and see the Introduction to this volume. Leonard Lawlor, analyzing Derrida, explains this element of Heidegger’s work: Animals cannot know the world “as such” because “they have no access to the ‘as such’ of death,” This is Not Sufficient (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 45. 44

crossing over: (dis)ability, contingent agency, and death 335 claims in his recent interpretation of Derrida’s work, Derrida was wary of this absolute distinction, never claiming that humans and animals are the same, but rather that our differences are less profound than they can be made to seem.46 Most specifically for our purposes here, Derrida shows how humans cannot finally know death and so cannot be made into complete subjects by that knowledge.47 In this way, humans resemble other animals. Similarly in this context, the specter of death hangs over Harrison’s and Grandin’s texts as a ghost we can only know via proxies. Our knowledge of death in these stories appears in the form of others’ deaths whom we can neither fully know nor refuse as parts of us. For Lawlor, such cases show how the subject cannot keep the others out of itself: we have an “inability to keep the border [between self and other] closed.”48 Does this mean we lack agency or ability? Lawlor, articulating a central point in his book’s argument, says no. Instead, we must forge a new understanding of agency and ability: On the one hand, the inability means that, reversing the inability into an ability to be able, we are able to welcome others into ourselves. On the other hand, the inability means that, by welcoming, we internalize others, making them the same as us, making them die as other.49

Such are precisely the tensions of Harrison’s narrative. Joe so interests the narrator that the latter insists on telling his story far beyond the call of duty for the coroner. Yet that very framework, we saw above, ironically marks the story’s necessary failures of representation, an acknowledgement of how narration and naming kill the other without possibly fully re-presenting the other’s vitality. Indeed, Harrison’s approach, bearing such difficulties in mind, closely resembles Derrida’s in the texts collected in The Work of Mourning. This book of funeral orations for such luminaries as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes persistently conveys tension between Derrida’s desire and even his need to re-present valuable lives and his recognition of the impossibility of doing so, acknowledgement of how great the distance is between words and

46

Lawlor, 45. In addition to the passages in Derrida cited in note 45, see Lawlor, 53–60, especially 57. 48 Lawlor, 101. 49 Lawlor, 101. 47

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those lives themselves. Both Harrison’s and Derrida’s books, like Temple Grandin’s texts, reside somewhere between generic categories. Harrison’s conclusion reiterates his text’s generic hybridity while calling into question once more the human/animal difference, suggesting a new framework entirely. The final two sentences figure all readers of Joe’s tale as animals—animals like Joe—who are always confronting the difficulties of embodied life: “Like any other mammal I am trying, moment by moment, to think of what I should do next. Joe had left us to ourselves.”50 This formulation not only recalls the disability that is mourning, it reiterates the universality of death, the impending disability of the mortal flesh. Here we are also reminded how narrative functions in the world: Joe in a very real sense had driven and organized our activities as readers. The story thus once again doubles its genre identity at this moment because the “us” of the final sentence clearly signifies not only the community in the story who took care of and admired Joe, but also the “us” of the reading audience. The doubled genres in final paragraph, then, are fiction and criticism. This passage functions as narrative and as an allegory of storytelling, reminding us how we learn and distract ourselves from our unique lives by following tales. This final touch reiterates the whole story as an allegory of storytelling, where we are the beasts unknown to ourselves but also always left to ourselves in a form of incomplete selfhood and partial agency. This is what I understand Derrida (and his English translator) to mean when they repeatedly cast subjectivity as partly an animality in pursuit of others, following others.51 The weak selfhood of reading examplifies a subjectivity that is always exposed to others, following others, unable to exert final or complete control even over neat, ostensibly safe and fictional texts. Harrison’s story exposes the mortal weakness of subjectivity. Grandin’s story has elements of this reality too that should be made visible alongside the clearly important celebrations of her astonishing achievements. With her status as translator for animals comes her feeling of being marginal to humanity, her testimonies about not understanding

50

Harrison, 97. The title of Derrida’s first section in The Animal That Therefore I Am is translated as “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” and the notes point out that “The parenthesis also reminds us that we would have to hear the je suis of the title in at least two registers, those of being [être] and following [suivre]” (161, note 1). Also see 3 in the text, where Derrida unfolds this element of his analysis. 51

crossing over: (dis)ability, contingent agency, and death 337 human emotions, her extreme self-consciousness about what it means to function within language, since she feels herself such a stranger to it by nature.52 Further, the specter of death never leaves her autobiographical work, since we know her perhaps primary intellectual claim to fame is that “one third of the cattle and hogs in the United States are handled in equipment I have designed.”53 That equipment is designed to raise and kill animals, with the attendant horrors that Grandin criticizes, despite her general acceptance of the meat industry.54 Indeed, Grandin’s work with animal-handling systems is shot through with ironies centered on awareness of weakness and mortality. She claims, “Cows are the animals I love best.”55 Her successes in improving equipment to handle them depend upon her ability to empathize, rooted in this love: “you can’t solve an animal mystery unless you put yourself in their place—literally in their place. You have to go where the animal goes, and do what the animal does.”56 In other words, Grandin’s astonishing success requires her to keenly and carefully imagine an animal’s experience approaching death. In this way, her work with animals closely resembles Harrison’s narrator’s sympathetic stance, focused on shared exposure to mortality, even if for many readers Grandin seems to accept too readily how modern animal industries treat animals. The universality of death is an ordinary and unsurprising principle, but one that has the power to challenge our notions of agency and ability vis-a-vis disability. Martha Nussbaum in Frontiers of Justice shows much like Thomson has above that the account of humans as able, as agents, is itself always something of a useful fiction: As the life span increases, the relative independence that many people sometimes enjoy looks more and more like a temporary condition, a phase of life that we move into gradually and all too quickly begin to leave. Even in our prime, many of us encounter shorter or longer periods of extreme dependency on others—after surgery or a severe injury, or during a period of depression or acute mental stress. Although a theoretical analysis may attempt to distinguish phases of a “normal” life from

52 53 54 55 56

See Grandin and Johnson, 1–8, for example, and Grandin throughout. Grandin, 3. See for example Grandin and Johnson, 270. Grandin and Johnson, 307. Grandin and Johnson, 31.

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Nussbaum called independent agency a “phase of life”; we might also call it one genre we all operate in at least sometimes, but never permanently. If nothing else can demonstrate this impermanence, mortality can. In the context of such arguments, it becomes clear that texts which seem to upset notions of an absolute divide between the abled and the disabled, even those categorized as “fictional,” undertake political work. They call into question how many such categories function in the world, how, for instance, the wholesale category of “animals” is conventionally denied “agency” and thereby deprived of many forms of engagement with the world. Similarly, Derrida’s work summarized in Lawlor’s discussion of agency and the human/animal distinction necessarily involves a new political program—not the end of democracy or some such, but a deeper awareness of the role of weakness in political systems. This awareness, as Nussbaum’s work demonstrates, should actually shift the way we think about agency in democracy and thereby the way we practice it, though such matters extend beyond the focus of this essay. So, we are partial strangers, sometimes visitors to the genre of ability. By this I most certainly have also meant ability in language, a terrain in which perfect agency is also unfortunately temporary, arriving in fits and starts at best for humans as well as for animals. If this were not so, if we all inhabited language perfectly, why would we rely for instance on a text or a script when giving an academic talk, the genre where this essay began? In a sense both obvious and surprising, I am a stranger to my own language, especially when it has an audience. Indeed, Derrida highlights how even the practice of naming—a kind of metaphor for language use—foretells weakness, mortality, as he mourns the death of Roland Barthes: “The proper name [. . .] alone and by itself says death, all deaths in one. It says death even while the bearer of it is still living.”58 The name “by itself forcefully declares the unique disappearance of the unique” by marking the singularity of the person who must, necessarily, die, and whose name, in its uniqueness,

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Nussbaum, 101. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 34. 58

crossing over: (dis)ability, contingent agency, and death 339 says so even as it renders that unique person blandly exchangeable in language, killing the uniqueness. And this point brings us full circle, back to the opening of this chapter and to animals, who are the conventional strangers-to-language. Stories like Harrison’s and Grandin’s remind us how vulnerable even human access to language and agency is. But these stories can also call to mind the increasingly numerous narratives parallel to Grandin’s, including for example those of Alex the parrot, Koko the gorilla, and other beings who have found their ways into human language and thereby into human-legible forms of agency (at least partly) when put (or forced) into an enabling context. Their stranger-in-language status echoes much of what has been said in so-called postmodernity about the position of the language-using subject in general and the politically marginalized language user in particular, subjects who bring unique forms of life to systems that they do not fit into perfectly. They change to adapt to the systems in order to have recognizable agency and selfhood, but they also implicitly change the function and nature of the systems. Such cases should make us more careful about the way we characterize other species, and the ways we regard ability and disability, agency and its opposite, since in many cases what is missing is not agency but the ability and will of the powerful to see it.

ENVOI

TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF THE POLYP Laurence Simmons Your little aquatic being is something which is so singular and so surprising that it seems to me that it ought to be regarded as one of the greatest marvels that the Study of Natural History can offer. —Charles Bonnet to Abraham Trembley, 24 March 1741 Polyp. A word you can take out to play with its best friends, ‘syrup’ and ‘dollop’. An alliterative word. A pulsing sweet and bursting word which takes hold of the lips and purses them, curls the tongue like a trigger, condenses air into ready release, closing on the soft plosive like a kiss. Polyp. Pass it from mouth to mouth. The muscular explosion of tiny blobs of animal life. —Dael Allison, ‘Polyp’

Polyp Physiognomy On hearing the word polyp most people do not think of animals but rather a medical condition of the intestine. Non-medical polyps are microscopical forms of life consisting of a tubular body, ranging from 1mm to 20mm, secured by a simple adhesive foot. At the free end of the body is a mouth opening, surrounded by a ring of 5 to 12 thin mobile tentacles. Each tentacle is clothed with highly specialised stinging cells. The name polyp was given to these organisms from their supposed resemblance to an octopus (Fr. poulpe) with its circle of arms writhing around a mouth. Polyps are members of the Phylum Cnidaria from the Greek word cnidos meaning stinging nettles (Figures 1 and 2). Indeed it was not until 1740 that polyps were known to be animals at all.1 This was discovered by Swiss naturalist Abraham Trembley

1 Dutch naturalist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) had classified the polyp as a plant in 1703.

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Figures 1–2. Freshwater Hydrozoan Hydras (Photos: universe-review. ca (1) and Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California (2)).

(1710–1784)2 who that summer having collected jars of water from freshwater ponds in the grounds of the castle of Sorgvliet near The Hague, discovered a small, tentacled creature that appeared to possess the characteristics of both plants and animals. At first glance, it looked like a water plant—but, unlike a plant, it contracted when touched, was able to move along glass progressing in a definite direction in a kind of head-over-heels walk, or by looping like a caterpillar. It preferred to cluster in areas of sunlight, and when it reached the edge of the top layer of water of the jar it would slide out over the supporting surface film hang down and appear to wave its tentacles of its own accord in search of food. Trembley also discovered that the polyp had a mouth, often quite invisible, in the midst of the circlet of tentacles; and after entangling a small worm or water flea in its tentacles, it could engulf and digest its prey. The interior of the polyp was a single undivided sac, and the juice from the digested food was simply absorbed into the inner layer lining the polyp’s cavity. These features seemed, to Trembley, to endow the green plant-like creatures with Aristotle’s sensitive soul,

2 For a comprehensive biography of Trembley see John R. Baker, Abraham Trembley of Geneva, Scientist and Philosopher (1710–1784) (London: Arnold, 1952).

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characteristic of animals.3 In an effort to resolve the question, Trembley, without any magnification beyond that of a simple single lens, studied the freshwater polyp in detail and also made the key discovery that a polyp cut crosswise or lengthwise into pieces soon became as many complete polyps that could catch prey, grow and move about normally again. Some animals can regenerate particular organs (the lizard and its tail, or the crayfish and crab its legs or claws, and snakes their skin) but polyps are truly autogenetic, and no animal before had been known to have survived its complete decimation. Parisian academician RenéAntoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757)4 had thirty years earlier studied the regeneration of the legs of the crayfish, and Trembley’s cousin, Swiss naturalist and philosopher Charles Bonnet (1720–1793),5 had proved parthenogenesis in 1740 by establishing that reproduction was possible in aphids without male fertilisation. Trembley carefully described his initial experiments and observations to Bonnet in Geneva and Réaumur in Paris, and his experiments were so beautifully conceived and executed that they left his older and more distinguished correspondent Réaumur breathless.6 Trembley’s obsession with the micro-organism led to the remarkable discovery that freshwater polyps could regenerate their heads and feet, and if cut into a few pieces, all of

3 In De anima II,2 Aristotle makes the distinction between a nutritive soul (plants), sensitive soul (animals) and rational soul (human beings). 4 On Réaumur see F. N. Egerton, ‘A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 21: Réaumur and His History of Insects,’ Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 87:3 (2006): 212–24. 5 For primary sources relating to the discovery of the hydra and the relations between Trembley, Réaumur and Bonnet see Virginia P. Dawson, Nature’s Enigma: The Problem of the Polyp in the Letters of Bonnet, Trembley, and Réaumur (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987); Sylvia G. Lenhoff and Howard M. Lenhoff, Abraham Trembley’s Memoirs Concerning the Polyps. Book I: Some Reflections on Abraham Trembley and his Mémoires. Book II: A Translation from the French of Mémoires, pour servir a l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce, à bras en forme de cornes (Pacific Grove, CA: Boxwood Press, 1986). 6 Réaumur writes: “I confess that when I saw for the first time two polyps form little by little from the one I had cut in two, I could hardly believe my eyes,” quoted in Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, p. 95. Several commentators have argued that Trembley’s discovery represents the foundation of experimental biology: see Joseph Schiller, ‘Queries, Answers and Unsolved Problems in Eighteenth-Century Biology,’ History of Science 12 (1974): 184–99, on p. 185; and Marino Buscaglia, ‘The Rhetoric of Proof and Persuasion Utilized by Abraham Trembley,’ in From Trembley’s Polyps to New Directions in Research on Hydra, ed. Howard M. Lenhoff and Paul Tardent (Archives des Sciences Geneva 38:3 (1985): 305–19).

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them would regenerate to form new individuals.7 In a letter to Charles Bonnet dated December 22, 1741, Trembley wrote: I made Hydras with seven and eight heads, by cutting them lengthwise part way down the body beginning at the head. Then I did the exploit of Hercules. I valorously cut off the seven heads from one Hydra. Seven heads came back, and what is more, each of the seven heads which were cut off will soon be in a state to become a Hydra. For this I am careful to nourish them well. I have a polyp which was already cut in 36 parts and most of these 36 multiply and would multiply if I wished it.8

Trembley also discovered that the polyps were able to reproduce asexually through a process that he likened to budding in plants, the offspring emerging progressively from the body of the parents like an offshoot of a branch. He proved by exacting observations that the cavity within the budded polyp communicated directly with the lumen of the parent, and particles of undigested food could be seen moving in either direction from one cavity to the other. He even saw a third generation of young polyps starting to bud on the sides of the off spring of the second generation before it had loosened its hold on the parent and become a totally independent individual. Thus, a polyp was an animal that could reproduce itself, not by the union of male and female parents, but by a process of uniparental budding, an asexual process analogous to the parthenogenic reproduction of aphids. Trembley also experimented with turning the polyp inside out, in order to determine whether the inner surface of its cavity was different in nature from its outer layer. Trembley thrust a bristle through the polyp’s body close to the inverted circlet of tentacles, so the polyp was unable to turn itself right side out. In this inside-out transfiguration, the polyp continued to catch prey, digest it, grow and form new tentacles and even bud and generate little polyps.9

7 Indeed today we know that the hydra is not only able to survive amputations, it can also be dissolved into a single-cell solution from which it will reconstitute itself over a period of weeks. 8 Translated and quoted in Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, p. 164; the original French is transcribed on p. 207. 9 Bonnet regarded this experiment as the most important that Trembley described since it confirmed an earlier description by Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) of animals as inside-out plants. This further confirmed Bonnet’s hunch that polyps linked the animal and vegetable realms in the chain of being, see Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, pp. 166–72.

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Trembley, whose eighteenth-century portrait engraving gives him tentacle-like hair, was also able to split the head of the polyp longitudinally and allow two heads to regenerate (Figure 3). By repeatedly splitting the new heads, he was able to generate a multi-headed animal that he named Hydra in reference to the mythological creature. In Greek mythology the Lernaean Hydra (a mythologised polyp?) had the body of a serpent and many heads (the number of heads varies from 5 to 100 but generally 9 is accepted as the standard). These heads could never be harmed by any weapon, and if any of the heads was severed another would immediately grow in its place. The Hydra of Lerna was killed by Heracles, as one of his Twelve Labours, by using fire to cauterise the Hydra’s neck stumps after decapitation. Later, Linnaeus renamed the simple freshwater polyp hydra in honour of Trembley. Through his study of the hydra, Trembley was one of the first scientists to demonstrate that animals could reproduce asexually. It has often been assumed that hydra are also unique among animals in that they do not undergo senescence (aging) and are thus immortal.10 Given its remarkable regenerative powers it is perhaps not surprising that the polyp became directly involved in the philosophical speculations of the nature of the soul and the teleology of organic forms (Figures 4 and 5). Polyp Philosophy One of the most important issues in the premodern biology of the eighteenth century was the struggle between preformationist and epigenetic theories of development.11 Preformation—the theory that all the organisms were preformed at the creation of the world—proposed the view that the adult organism was contained, already formed in miniature, in the sperm, and that development was the growth and solidification of this miniature being in a mechanistic process. The

10 Because it is engaged in a process of permanent embryogenesis the hydra never ages (at least as we understanding aging). As one recent textbook puts it: “Hydra is a perpetual embryo, and although its terminally differentiated cells die, the cell community survives,” Werner A. Müller, Developmental Biology (New York: Springer Verlag, 1997), 36. 11 For a discussion of the legacy of Aristotelian natural philosophy and a general history of the debate between preformationism and epigenesis, see Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth Century French Thought, trans. Robert Ellrich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) and Helmut Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy and Literature around 1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

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Figure 3. Abraham Trembley, engraving by Ambroise Tardieu after Clemens (Smithsonian Institution Libraries).

theory of epigenesis—the theory that organisms generate themselves under the guidance of a formative drive—on the other hand, recognised that the organism was not yet formed in the fertilised egg, but that it arose as a consequence of profound changes in shape and form during the course of embryogenesis out of unstructured matter. Trembley’s discovery of regeneration in the freshwater polyp, which could not simply be explained within the prevailing category of encapsulated sperm, was advanced as the most far-reaching interrogation of the preformationist tradition and its philosophical premises. This was to lead to the concept of the organism as a self-reproducing entity. For if development is wholly predetermined in the egg or sperm, how was it possible for the body to continue to regenerate itself in response to the contingency of loss? The hydra’s plasticity and its ambiguous status between animal and vegetal raised questions as to whether the organism should be understood as a colony of living units or as a global and interdependent whole. In D’Alembert’s Dream (1769) French philosopher Denis Diderot has recourse to the analogy of the polyp to describe the futuristic constitution of an organism. Mademoiselle de

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Figures 4–5. Illustrations from Abraham Trembley, Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce, à bras en forme des cornes. Leiden 1744.

L’Espinasse who has transcribed D’Alembert’s dream-induced ravings reads them out to his doctor: Come now, Philosopher, your idea is that there are polyps of all sorts, even human polyps . . . Only we do not find any such thing in nature . . . Either that has already happened, or it will happen. And besides, who knows how things may be on some of the other planets? . . . Perhaps on Jupiter and Saturn there are human polyps! . . . To think of men splitting up into an infinite number of little men the size of atoms . . . . Why, you could make a whole human society or at least populate a whole province with the pieces of one individual.

Doctor Bordeu recognises the truth of D’Alembert’s ravings: That may seem like an extravagant notion, but it is what actually takes place with all existing species of lower animals, and it will doubtless be true of future species too. Even if man does not change into an infinite

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laurence simmons number of men, at least he changes into an infinite number of tiny animals whose future changes in shape or structure it is impossible to foresee. Who knows whether our species is not simply a hatchery for another generation of beings who will supplant our species after the lapse of countless centuries, during which successive modifications will occur?12

There were those who struggled with the classification of the polyp as animal. The French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire (1694–1798) with much curiosity observed a vase full of polyps displayed on the mantelpiece of his friend du Faï’s home, but he was unable to accept their animal nature, declaring: “This production called a polyp is much more like a carrot or an asparagus than an animal.”13 The traditional view of the animal, accepted prior to Trembley’s discovery of the polyp, was that animals were complex systems of interdependent parts and if an animal was cut up at random it would be expected to die. That it might reorganise itself and reform into a complete animal, perfect in all respects, led to a re-examination of the basic assumptions of natural history. The reproductive abilities of the polyp brought into focus the problem of the animal ‘soul’ which had been debated by naturalists and metaphysicians since the publication, posthumously, of Descartes Primae cogitations circa generationem animalium (1701). For theorists like Bonnet the polyp was the missing link—predicated by Leibniz (whose ‘law of continuity’ argued there could be no breaks in the continuity of nature)—between plants and animals. In 1745 Bonnet arrived at the conclusion that the polyp represented the connecting relation between the forms of vegetative and animal life, and he devised a tentative ‘échelle des êtres’ (chain of being) in which the polyp represented the connecting link between forms of vegetal and animal life.14 Bonnet struggled to reconcile the doctrine of preformed germ and unitary soul with the disconcerting proliferative feats of the hydra. For where was the animal soul located? If the young came from a fertilised, or even an unfertilised egg (as in the case of the aphid), the embryo might be preformed within the egg; but new polyps could appear from almost any part of the parent’s body except the tentacles. This would

12 Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, trans. Jacques Barzun and Ralph H. Bowen (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1964), 115–16. 13 Cited in Baker, Abraham Trembley of Geneva, p. 45. 14 See Aram Vartanian, ‘Trembley’s Polyp, La Mettrie, and Eighteenth-Century French Materialism,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 11:3 (1950): 259–86 (pp. 265–66).

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suggest that every part of the polyp had within it the preformed germ. Bonnet and his colleagues, liberal Cartesians in philosophical terms, struggled to make sense of Trembley’s discoveries. The professors of philosophy felt the answer might lie in the ideas of philosopher and mathematician Jean-Louis Calandrini (1703–1758), who had been one of Trembley’s teachers. Calandrini, in a theory derived from Augustine and perhaps from Leibniz, argued that the ‘soul’ is divisible, and is made up of ‘germs’ present in its every part.15 In a refined version of his doctrine of preformation that seems to unite the antithetical ideas of preformation and epigenesis, Bonnet proposed that the germ was something that contained ‘tres en petit’ the elements of all the organic parts, a sort of network passed down from generation to generation, within which the nutritive matter taken in by the organism could enlarge it by growth. Of course, this conclusion resounds with our modern knowledge and uncannily seems to prefigure, if only somewhat vaguely, the concept of the genome, the entire complement of DNA of an organism present in its every cell. It has been suggested that the recent history of stem-cell research and the experimental isolation of embryonic stem cells—cells that when isolated from the inner cell mass of the early embryo are able to renew themselves indefinitely—needs to be situated within this tradition of experimental studies in regeneration and has as one of its privileged models, the freshwater polyp.16 Polyps subsequently became important in the discourse of eighteenth century Materialism—the explanation of psychical processes by physical and chemical changes in the nervous system. French physician, and founder of cognitive science, Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709–51), was led by Trembley’s experiments on the polyp to describe all animals and human beings as self-moving mechanisms in his Man a Machine (1748), providing a mechanistic interpretation of human nature on the basis of physiological theory.17 Also important for La Mettrie was the fact that his theories depended upon a theory of ‘muscular irritability’—the ability of muscle tissue to move functionally

15 Calandrini’s observations, as we shall see, prefigure those of August Weismann. For Calandrini see Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, pp. 159–62. 16 Melinda Cooper, ‘Rediscovering the Immortal Hydra: Stem Cells and the Question of Epigenesis,’ Configurations 11 (2003): 1–26. Cooper’s arguments are based on David R. Marshak, David Gotlieb, and Richard L. Gardner, Stem Cell Biology (New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001). 17 See Aram Vartanian, La Mettrie’s “L’homme machine”: A Study in the Origins of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960).

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when stimulated independently of the nervous system taken as evidence of the materiality of the soul—later elaborated definitively in 1752 by German physiologist Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777). For La Mettrie the polyp was ideal support for this phenomenon of irritability. The division of the polyp into many parts without loss of its vital principle served to prove that the animal’s soul was material and indistinct substantially from its physical organization. In a move that showed a willingness to attribute self-determination and design to matter, he asks of Trembley’s polyp: “Does it not contain within itself the causes which produce its regeneration?”18 La Mettrie also argues against the notion that the soul might be co-extensive with the body, scattered throughout rather than being located in one place. Since, counters La Mettrie, this would simply mean that in the severed parts of a body there would only be a ‘remainder of the soul’ not the soul as such. La Mettrie, like Bonnet, sees that from this indistinctness between soul and matter the polyp provided for uniformity between the vegetal and animal realms, support, that is, for a materialist ‘chain of being’.19 Thus, argues Aram Vartanian, it is possible to see in La Mettrie’s treatise “the main elements of the century’s evolutionary materialism: ‘matter endowed with self-determining powers,’ ‘chain of being,’ and ‘transformism’.”20 The bond established by La Mettrie between the humble polyp and the developing biological materialism of the eighteenth century provides a means of understanding the changes in philosophy at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The influence of the polyp moved in several directions. Trembley’s discovery of the hydra was further canonised in Immanuel Kant’s formulation, in his Critique of Judgement (1790), of the epigenetic principle of self-organisation in nature in which the organism is defined as self-regulative, selfregenerative and self-reproductive within limits of a purposive whole (Zweckmässigkeit). For Kant the machine possesses no self-organising power: “an organised being is not a mere machine. For a machine has only motive force. But an organised being has within it formative

18

Ibid., p. 270. On Bonnet’s ‘chain of being’ see Lorin Anderson, Charles Bonnet and the Order of the Known (Studies in the History of Science, vol. 11) (Boston: Reidel, 1982); Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, pp. 171–76; and the earlier more general and influential history of the idea by Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). 20 Vartanian, La Mettrie’s “L’homme machine”, p. 273. 19

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force . . . a formative force that propagates itself.”21 German philosopher Friedrich Lange (1828–1875) in his History of Materialism (1865), again following Trembley, argued that the example of the polyp must entail the death of God since the polyp’s self-regenerative ability demonstrated that the soul could not be in the head or the heart as was previously believed, and that it was divisible and material. “The polyp cut up by Trembley had in itself the causes of its reproduction. Only ignorance of natural forces has made us take refuge in a God.”22 Polyp Psychology Lange’s History of Materialism was one of the young Friedrich Nietzsche’s favourite books and from it he was to develop what Brian Domino has called a ‘polyp psychology’.23 The psyche, Nietzsche argued in Daybreak (1881), is polyp-like with many arms, each arm representing a drive, and our experience washes over the tentacles accidentally nourishing some while missing others. That people respond differently to the same event is due to different polyp arms being nourished or ignored. As a result of this chance nourishment and growth, this ‘accidentality’, the fully-grown polyp or psyche can never know the totality of drives that constitute its being. Nietzsche, who was also familiar with La Mettrie’s work,24 wrote: our daily experiences throw some prey in the way of now this, now that drive, and the drive seizes it eagerly; but the coming and going of these events as a whole stands in no rational relationship to the nutritional requirements of the totality of the drives: so that the outcome will always be twofold—the starvation and stunting of some and the overfeeding of others. Every moment of our lives sees some of the polyp-arms of our being grow and others of them wither, all according to the nutriment which the moment does or does not bear with it. Our experiences are, as already said, all in this sense means of nourishment, but the nourishment

21 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) (Section 81, para. 64). 22 Frederick Albert Lange, History of Materialism, trans. Ernest Chester Thomas (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., 1890), 2:72. 23 Brian Domino, ‘Polyp Man,’ A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal, ed. Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 43–49 (43). 24 See George Stack, Lange and Nietzsche (New York: de Gruyter, 1983), 139–41.

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laurence simmons is scattered indiscriminately without distinguishing between the hungry and those already possessing a superfluity. And as a consequence of this chance nourishment of the parts, the whole, fully-grown polyp will be something just as accidental as its growth has been.

The psyche is like a polyp with each arm representing something like a drive. Experience washes over the tentacles offering chance nourishment to some, which then grow, but depriving others, that then wither. If the ‘tentacle’ does not have the opportunity to discharge its strength then, “after a few months of non-gratification, it will wither away like a plant that has not been watered.”25 Indeed, the polyps’ multiplicity may have become the source of Nietzsche’s doctrine of perspectivism. For Nietzsche, it is our drives that interpret the world, that are perspectival—and not our egos, not our conscious ideas and opinions. Each of us has multiple perspectives on the world because of the multiplicity of our drives—drives that are often contradictory among themselves. Moreover, these drives are in a constant struggle or combat with each other. To be sure, we can combat the drives, fight against them—indeed, this is one of the most common themes in philosophy, the struggle against the passions. In another passage from Daybreak, Nietzsche says that he can see six fundamental methods we have at our disposal for combating the drives. But then Nietzsche asks: Who exactly is combating the drives in these various ways? His answer (given in a second aphorism taken from Daybreak) is this: The fact that one desires to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand within our own power; nor does the choice of any particular method; nor does the success or failure of this method. What is clearly the case is that in this entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive which is a rival of the drive who vehemence is tormenting us. . . . While ‘we’ believe we are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is complaining about the other . . .26

What we call thinking, willing, and feeling are all merely a relation of these drives to each other. One of Nietzsche’s heirs in the twentieth century, Gilles Deleuze, was to use the example of the polyp as a means of resolving the debate between preformation and epigenesis by arguing that there is no simple 25 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 118–19. 26 Ibid., p. 109.

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correspondence between the intensive pre-formations and the extensive developed formations; that is, there exists no individual as such, only an on-going process of individuation.27 In Anti-Oedipus (1972) Deleuze and Guattari take up the Nietzschean schema to characterise drives as ‘desiring machines’ arguing that drives never exist in a free and unbound state, nor are they ever merely individual; they are always arranged and assembled by the social formation in which we find ourselves. Deleuze and Guattari’s companion notion of a body without organs (BwO), developed in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), is explicitly linked by them to the work of the German biologist August Weismann who in turn had been influenced by the discourses and debates around the polyp.28 In a late nineteenth century attempt to establish natural selection as the sole driving force, Weismann argued that life resided in the germinal substance, ‘germ plasm’, which transcends and predetermines epigenetic processes of development, and is transmitted from generation to generation.29 For Weismann life is able to replicate and reproduce itself owing to the powers of a special hereditary substance, the germ plasm (what today we call DNA), which controls and programmes in advance, and without external influence, the parts of an organism that get transmitted continuously from one generation to the next. With the potent combination of Nietzsche, Weismann and Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907), Deleuze and Guattari were to advance what Keith Ansell Pearson calls a coherent philosophy of ‘germinal life’.30 Their engagement with evolutionary theory and modern ethology provided a machinic approach to questions of evolution and an ethology that focused on assemblages, not psychology or behaviour. The discovery of the humble polyp was to create a revolution in ideas

27 Deleuze’s use of the term individuation is derived from the work of the relatively unknown French philosopher of science Gilbert Simondon. See Deleuze’s account of Simondon’s work in ‘Review of Gilbert Simondon’s L’individu et sa genèse physicobiologique (1966),’ Pli 12 (2001): 43–49. See also Deleuze’s discussion of the animal soul in his The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, translated by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 10–13. 28 Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 164. The polyp provides a perfect elementary picture of a body without organs. 29 August Weismann, The Germ-Plasm: A Theory of Heredity (London: Walter Scott, 1893). 30 Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

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that extended well beyond science into social and moral realms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life. Polyp Pediment Coral reefs found in the warm, clear shallow waters of tropical oceans worldwide are one of the most diverse and productive animal communities on Earth. Coral reefs are formed by calcium carbonate produced by tiny coral polyps. A coral colony may consist of thousands of polyps that feed carnivorously on small particles floating in the water. An entire colony many metres in diameter can start out as a single polyp. Coral polyps live in a symbiotic relationship with microscopic algae (zooxanthellae), which are incorporated into their soft tissue. The algae obtain carbon dioxide from the coral polyps, and the polyps receive nutrients from the algae. By consuming the polyps’ nitrogenous wastes these miniature recycling experts fuel themselves to help photosynthesise sunlight into the nutrients corals need for 98 percent of their food requirement. Coral polyps also have a relationship to the fish that rest or take refuge within their coral branches, and which excrete nutrients that make the corals grow faster. The majority of corals form large colonies, although there are species that live singly. The accumulated skeletons of coral polyps make up large coral reefs and atolls. The Great Barrier Reef, to the northeast of Australia, is about 1,600 kilometres long, has a total area of 20,000 square kilometres, and its polyps add 50 million tonnes of calcium to the reef each year (Figure 6).31 The coral polyp reproduces itself in several ways. The coral colony can expand in size by asexual budding. Budding may be intratentacular, in which the new bud forms from the oral discs of the old polyp, as in Diploria, or extratentacular in which the new polyp forms from the base of the old polyp, as in Montastraea cavernosa. Another common type of asexual reproduction in corals is by fragmentation where broken pieces of corals that land on a suitable substrate may begin growing and produce a new colony. This type of reproduction is common in branching corals like Acropora cervicorni. In addition coral may reproduce sexually where gametes fuse to form a tiny planula or larva that then drifts questing for a surface on which to anchor and, if 31 On corals in general see O. A. Jones and R. Endean, Biology and Geology of Coral Reefs (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).

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Figure 6. Coral (Photo: NOAA CCMA Biogeography Team).

successful, the planula grows into a polyp. Millions of these planulae emerge from a living reef at certain times of the year. Spawning of the corals occurs during the neap tide, when the pull of the moon works against the pull of the sun to produce the least tidal sway. The polyps of hard coral secrete theca to form limestone cups called corallites and in these safe miniature caves the polyps develop into small organisms like anemone. The soft, coloured tentacles with which they catch their prey flower at each ‘cave’ opening. The two main coral types are distinguished by the number of tentacles: soft corals, octocorallia, have eight, while scleratinians, the hard corals, bear tentacles in multiples of six. The hard corals and their broadcast spawning planulae are the main reef-building (hermatypic) corals, and the most common. The soft corals are brooders and tend to retain their egg cells and await the arrival of the sperm gametes. There are hundreds of coral forms from the densely packed whorls of brain coral to the open antlers of staghorn coral. Some corals are contained and rounded like small boulders to resist the pounding of the sea, others may spread metres across the seabed in a fantasy of shapes, and in protected waters the

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branching forms offer more surface for intercepting the light and sifting plankton from the water. Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658–1730), considered the founding father of oceanography, observed minute growths coming out of coral branches he had transported from the Mediterranean Sea to a large glass jar. In his Histoire physique de la mer (1725) he interpreted these growths as the ‘flowers’ of the coral. Coral previously considered a mineral he now believed to be a vegetable. However, Marsigli’s thesis was soon challenged by his collaborator, French surgeon Jean-André Peyssonel, who in 1727 correctly identified the ‘flowers’ of coral as small animals.32 More perplexing were the accounts that eighteenth-century travellers brought back of the rings of living coral that they had seen in the Pacific Ocean. The problem was how to explain these mysterious formations that existed only in shallow water, less than 50 metres deep, whereas the Pacific Ocean was known to be immensely deep, up to 10,000 metres in places. Charles Lyell (1797–1875) who made the general argument for gradualism (or uniformitarianism)—the idea that present-day geological processes can explain the history of the earth— suggested that the ‘lagoon islands’ were made by coral growth forming on submarine volcanoes along the rims of their craters (Figure 7). In 1842 Charles Darwin, who had taken Lyell’s Principles of Geology with him on board the Beagle, first published a more comprehensive explanation for the creation of coral atolls in the South Pacific; he argued that a coral reef encircling a lagoon atoll was formed on the mantle of a volcanic peak that has since sunk. Darwin reasoned that reef-building corals would continue to build reefs upward toward the sunlight even if the bedrock below was sinking. As long as the rate of subsidence of the bedrock was equal to or lower than the growth rate of the corals, a coral reef could maintain its position in the ocean for thousands of years. In 1877 Alexander Agassiz, one of the most respected naturalists of his time, became locked in a vain thirty-year effort to disprove Darwin’s theory of the genesis of coral reefs which he saw as overly simple and insufficiently supported by the evidence. While sailing more than 1000,000 miles to visit every known coral formation, and losing his fortune in the process, Alexander played out in an eerie fashion the 32

For a detailed account of Peysonnel’s discovery and his manuscript Traité du corail see Anita McConnell, ‘The Flowers of Coral: Some unpublished conflicts from Montpellier and Paris during the Early Eighteenth Century,’ History and Philosophy of Life Sciences, 12 (1990): 51–66.

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evolutionary debate between his father Louis Agassiz and Darwin that occurred a few decades earlier and had tarnished his father’s reputation as a scientist (Figure 8).33 Polyp Pacific Since the arrival of eighteenth-century European explorers in the Pacific, the coral atoll has become a potent image and testing ground for Western ideas about the relationship between nature and culture. It is as much a rhetorical device, an intellectual artefact, as it is a physical, biological and cultural location. The tourist brochures market it as an escape: the coral atoll promises leisure, indolence, blue skies, azure seas, shimmering white sand, foaming coral reefs, waving palm trees, exotically coloured fish and flowers. As I wrote this text on my Macintosh iBook, if I paused or faltered for words, or when I lapsed into reverie, after a few minutes—reassuringly, as if I could never escape it—a similar image of the white coral sands of an idyllic Pacific atoll came up on my iBook screen as part of Apple Operating System X’s automatic screensaver. Novels like The Coral Island (1858) by R. M. Ballantyne, the story of three young English boys shipwrecked on a deserted coral atoll, or films like The Blue Lagoon (Dir. Randall Kleiser, 1980) and its sequel Return to the Blue Lagoon (Dir. William Graham, 1991), the coming to age of two adolescents shipwrecked on a beneficent atoll ecosystem, present the coral atoll, and its calm, shallow lagoon, as offering shelter from the direct force of the ocean, but also respite from the injustices and iniquities of Western civilisation. Ironically, much of our recent scientific knowledge about coral reefs and the formation of atolls has come as a result of the testing of the atomic bomb. A tiny atoll named Bikini, with coconut palms, pandanus trees and white sand beaches edging a blue-green lagoon at the northern edge of the Marshall Islands, was selected by the United States Navy as the site for postwar atomic testing and its 167 inhabitants were relocated to atolls south. In the wake of extensive drilling and geological surveys, between 1946 and 1958 23 atomic tests were performed at the Bikini lagoon. Eniwetok, another coral atoll in the Marshall Islands, was also

33 For the story of this often bitter debate see David Dobbs, Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005).

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Figures 7–8. Aitutaki coral atoll (Photo: Rarotonga Airways) (7). Coral atoll formation (8). Redrawn from Charles Darwin, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. London, 1842.

used as an official U.S. testing ground for atomic weapons. The U.S. Navy, preparing the test site, drilled down 1500 meters before hitting the volcanic basalt upon which the reef had originated. For more than thirty million years this coral reef had been growing on a sinking volcano, thickening as the lava beneath it subsided. Darwin’s theory had been convincingly confirmed. Unfortunately, as our understanding of the coral polyp and its reefs increases it becomes apparent that the anthropogenic dangers of human habitation upon these communities are increasing as well. The world’s first global survey of coral reefs, carried out in 1997, found around ninety five per cent of reefs had experienced some damage from overfishing, pollution, dynamiting, poisoning, and the dragging of ships’ anchors.34 Further research in 1998 and 2000 revealed the precarious future of the coral polyp, demonstrating that nearly two-thirds of the world’s coral reefs were at risk. It is hard for us to remember that a piece of coral bought from a curio shop by the tourist, who wishes to

34

See Dirk Bryant, Lauretta Burke, John McManus and Mark Spaulding, Reefs at Risk: A Map-Based Indicator of Threats to the World’s Coral Reefs. WRI/ICLARM/WCMC/ UNEP. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, 1998. Web version: http://www .wri.org/wri/indictrs/reefrisk.htm

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recall the dazzling underwater world just experienced, or the fragments worn as vibrant jewellery around our necks or wrists, have probably been harvested from healthy, living coral colonies. To the underwater diver the coral community appears as a dazzling and colourful assembly of many individual elements. In fact, the coral reef is a network of intimate, closely interdependent relationships and functions as one living integrated unit, a superorganism. The coral skeleton provides the supporting tissue; its porous construction with many caves and tunnels for fish, sponges, sea worms acts as a circulatory system, allowing the lifeblood of the sea to reach every ‘cell’ of the body. Coral reefs nurture a huge repository of ocean biodiversity and have a communication network like a giant nervous system. They are also a vital component of the earth’s carbon cycle, since coral polyps in the process of secreting their calcium carbonate absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at twice the rate of a rain forest. The balance for their survival, and that of the complex life-chains dependent on them, including humans, is tipping.35 Polyp Phenomenology Few marine creatures are as mysterious and intimidating as jellyfish. For Roland Barthes the stinging Medusa jellyfish was a metaphorical representation of doxa, accepted beliefs, or public opinion that stun us.36 But few realise that jellyfish (not a fish at all) are the larger, freeswimming stage of the smaller larval stage of the polyp. There are two basic forms of cnidarians: free swimming medusae and attached polyps. Certain cnidarians can change between these forms, while others are either medusae or polyps all their life. Jellyfish go through several different body shapes in the course of their life cycle. Adult, free-floating medusas produce eggs and sperm. Newly hatched larvae float in the currents until they find somewhere to attach. After a short time living 35 See B. E. Brown and J. C. Odgen, ‘Coral Bleaching,’ Scientific American, 269 (1993): 64–70; and O. Hoegh-Guldberg, ‘Climate change, coral bleaching and the future of the world’s coral reefs,’ Marine and Freshwater Research 50:8 (1999): 839–866. For a pessimistic overview of the place of coral within the current state of the world’s climate see Steve Jones, Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise (London: Little Brown, 2007). 36 “The Doxa is current opinion, meaning repeated as if nothing had happened. It is Medusa: who petrifies those who look at her. Which means that it is evident. Is it seen? Not even that: a gelatinous mass which sticks onto the retina,” Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 122.

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Figure 9. Discomedusae (Jellyfish) from Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur. Leipzig and Vienna, 1898.

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attached to a hard surface, through a process known as strobilation, the polyp divides itself into dozens of flat segments or ephyrae, which then peel off from the stack and float away. Ephyrae float and feed and grow until they are medusas, and the cycle starts anew. Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), the eminent German zoologist who coined the word ecology, was one of the first to be fascinated by and document jellyfish (Figure 9). In 1899 Haeckel, also an accomplished artist and illustrator, published Art Forms in Nature, a volume that contained many stunning coloured lithographs of medusae and is still considered one of the marvels of naturalist illustration.37 Haeckel lived in the ‘Villa Medusa’ in Jena and he used his drawings of jellyfish as models for the elaborate ceiling decoration of rooms of his villa. During the late nineteenth century, the Dresden studio of the Bohemian glassblower Leopold Blaschka (1822–1895) and his son Rudolph (1857–1829) produced beautifully detailed glass models of exotic sea creatures for natural history museums and acquaria all over the world. Among the most prized objects produced by the Blaschkas were their sea anemones (another cnidarian closely related to coral) and jellyfish. Each exquisitely intricate model was made by fusing clear and coloured pieces of glass using a combination of glass blowing and lamp-working. The translucence of the jellyfish was replicated by using finely speckled layers of pigment on the underside of the glass (Figures 10 and 11).38 Polyp Pictures One of the Greek names for coral is gorgoneion. According to Ovid (Metamorphoses [IV. 740–752]), after decapitation Perseus places the famed Gorgon’s head on a bed of seaweed, the soft stems of which harden on contact with the monstrous head, absorbing its power. From then on coral has kept the property of hardening on contact with air as its polyps die. Petrification is a paradigm for theorising the passage from living to dead, animated to fixed, supple to rigid. As a mythic model, an object through which thinking takes place, coral takes its place among the victims of the Medusa’s gaze. A gaze that Freud was

37

Art Forms in Nature: the Prints of Ernst Haeckel, trans. Michele Schons (New York: Prestel, 1998). 38 On the Blaschkas see J. Peto and A. Hudson, ed., Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka (London: Futura, 2002).

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Figures 10–11. Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, (10) Portuguese Man-ofWar (Physalia arethusa) and (11) Jellyfish (Carmarina hastata), National Museum and Gallery, Cardiff.

to link to the fear of castration and make the equation of petrification with male erection.39 For many art critics and commentators the representation of the decapitated Medusa head by Caravaggio, painted on a round shield, is a crucial figure for our understanding of the very processes and nature of representation, the staging of an identification between the seer and the seen (Figure 12);40 a portrait once attributed to Leonardo da Vinci offers Freud the opportunity to speculate on the importance of Oedipal conflict (Figure 13); and Cellini’s monumental statue of Perseus displaying Medusa’s head, the victor and the vanquished uncannily twinned in expression, provide the ground for reflections on the political significance of decapitation during the French Revolution.41 The snakehaired Medusa, one of the three Gorgons of Greek myth and the only 39 Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’ in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books [Macmillan], 1993), 212–13. 40 See Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 41 Neil Hertz, ‘Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria Under Political Pressure’ in his The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 161–93.

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Figures 12–13. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Medusa, 1597 (12) and Anonymous Flemish painter, Head of Medusa (13), Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Photos: Scala, Florence).

mortal one, became conflated with the many-headed Hydra, and they are linked in nature, of course, by the humble polyp. Méduse is the French word for jellyfish and medusa has become accepted as the generic term to categorise the jellyfish whose tentacles hang from the border of a radially symmetric bell. The forbidden face of Medusa—featured on coins, vases, jewellery, armour, temple pediments, door-knockers,

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seals—both carries and cures the disease of fascination. The mask of terror fascinates us but it is apotropaic, literally warding off or turning away the evils it embodies. Terror is used to drive out terror.42 Polyp Poetry The jellyfish has been a frequent subject of poetry in the twentieth century and Australian poet Les Murray’s short poem is a small gem, like the Blaschkes’ glass-blown medusae. jellyfish Globe globe globe globe soft glass bowls upside down over serves of nutty udder and teats under the surface of the sun.43

Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie’s poetry addresses our negotiation with the natural world as humans and explores the fact the earth is home to many different forms of consciousness. In her poem ‘The Glass-hulled Boat’ she gazes down at the ocean floor. The jellyfish she views, and tries to understand, are also described as ‘bowls’ and they become the embodiment of a solitary, melancholy drifting existence: First come the jellyfish: mauve-fringed, luminous bowls like lost internal organs, pulsing and slow. It’s as though we’re stalled in a taxi in an ill-lit, odd little town, at closing time, when everyone’s maudlin and really, ought just to go home . . .

At the end of her poem the “vaguely uterine jellyfish” are “spun out . . . fuddled but unperturbed” and given a new trajectory as the boat engines churn up the sea on leaving.44

42 For a selection of readings illustrating parallel strands of the Medusa legend see The Medusa Reader, ed. Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). 43 Les Murray, Collected Poems (Manchester, Carcanet, 1998), 528. 44 Kathleen Jamie, The Tree House (London: Picador, 2004), 21.

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The figure of the Medusa appears in the works of classical poets like Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Euripides, Ovid and Lucan but comes into its own in English poetry during the Romantic period. Goethe, Shelley, Pater, Rossetti and Swinburne are among the many Romantic artists obsessed with Medusa. Italian critic Mario Praz titled the introductory chapter of his famous study The Romantic Agony (1951) ‘The Beauty of the Medusa’, and in it he makes the figure of Medusa an iconograph for Romantic ‘dark loves’ and fascination with the abominable.45 One of the most telling examples of this iconography, he argues, is Shelley’s celebrated fragment ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery’ (1819). In the seventeenth century painting that inspired Shelley, which he (like many others) mistakenly attributed to Leonardo (Figure 13), the head of the Medusa is inverted and the mass of writhing snakes wrestles in the foreground. The eyes of Medusa, half-closed gaze upwards, and the head is surrounded in a mist in which can faintly be seen a variety of bats, mice and other ambiguous, sinister creatures. It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Upon the cloudy mountain-peak supine; Below, far lands are seen tremblingly; Its horror and its beauty are divine. Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine, Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath, The agonies of anguish and death.

The Romantic Medusa is a sublime object of both beauty and terror—“the tempestuous loveliness of terror” writes Shelley in the final stanza of his poem—and thus it is also made to refract the doubled and dark power of the poetic. If Medusa exercised a particular fascination for male writers of the Romantic period, it remained for twentieth century feminist poets to re-gender and reframe the questions posed by her elusive figure. Hélène Cixous, in her manifesto, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975), attacks the Freudian interpretation as a masculine projection: “You have only to

45 The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

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look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”46 Sylvia Plath, less than a year before her suicide, wrote the angry poem ‘Medusa’ (1962) which plays on a similarity between the Latin name for the jellyfish medusa (aurela aurita) and Plath’s mother’s name (Aurelia). The “eely tentacle” of Medusa (the jellyfish and the Gorgon) is refigured by Plath as the transatlantic telephone cable through which she and her mother communicated, and by which she felt her mother continued to trap her: . . . you are always there, Tremulous breath at the end of my line . . . I didn’t call you. I didn’t call you at all. Nevertheless, nevertheless You steamed to me over the sea, Fat and red, a placenta . . .47

Polyp Fiction The science-fiction writer H. G. Wells had trained as a zoologist under Thomas Huxley so perhaps it should come as no surprise that in his most famous work The War of the Worlds (1898) his fictional Martians are enlarged, tentacled, mechanised yet slimy versions of the polyp (Figure 14). Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth—above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eye—were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.48

46 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 (1976): 875–93. 47 Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 224–26. 48 A Critical Edition of The War of the Worlds: H. G. Wells Scientific Romance, with introduction and notes by David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geduld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 63.

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Figure 14. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1960 edition). Cover illustration by Edward Gorey.

In Wells’s earlier novel The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) the shipwrecked Edward Prendick stumbles upon the sinister and sadistic Dr Moreau who works on his deceptively beautiful island—an inverted coral atoll—making human-animal hybrids through a process of vivisection, in what is, we might say, a sophisticated version of Trembley’s original experiments that created the first many-headed hydra. In the 1920s Marcel Proust explored the layering of the self through contingency, self-reflexivity, change and desire. In In Search of Lost Time the narrator’s very identity seems to lose itself, becoming fractured and dissociated the more he focuses on it. He finds that it is by imagining the intricacies of the experiences of others he can best understand his own selfhood. In an excursion into natural science, the polyp provides Proust with a striking image for this plurality and extension of the self. The individual human being is seen as an imperfectly organised aggregation and the ‘chain of being’ is linked to a Proustian conception of time.

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laurence simmons I had always considered each one of us to be a sort of multiple organism or polyp, not only at a given moment of time . . . but also, similarly, where the personality is concerned and its duration through life, I had thought of this as a sequence of juxtaposed but distinct ‘I’s’ which would die one after the other or even come to life alternately, like those which at Combray took one another’s place within me when evening approached. But I had seen also that these moral cells of which an individual is composed are more durable than the individual himself.49

It is a passage resonant with the complexity of Trembley’s humble polyp. The individual dissolves into component parts, which have relation to the larger pattern of nature, a cosmos that is holographic because its totality can be recreated from any single part. Long before writing In Search of Lost Time, Proust had expressed a similar concept in the preface to his translation of Ruskin: If we could analyze the soul as we analyze matter, we would see that under the apparent diversity of minds as well as of things there are but a few simple substances and irreducible elements, and that into the composition of what we believe to be our personality enter elements that are quite common and that are met again to some degree everywhere in the universe.50

Poly(p)phony Who would have thought that the lowly polyp could have sparked fierce debates surrounding the mechanistic interpretation of human nature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; be the source in nature of two of the most lasting and well-represented Greek myths; be responsible for the landmass of coral reefs and atolls that protect the coastlines of 109 countries and are home to 25 per cent of all marine life; be the larval stage of one of the most enigmatic marine creatures, the mysterious yet intimidating jellyfish or medusa; be an inspiration for both the literature of intimacy and science fiction? Polyps are small, seemingly insignificant but through the eyes of scientists, philosophers, mythographers, glassblowers, visual artists, poets and novelists they

49 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. VI Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 299–300. 50 Marcel Proust, Preface to La Bible d’Amiens in his On Reading Ruskin, trans. Jean Autret, William Burford and Phillip J. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 10.

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have become not microscopic but telescopic, creatures not only of the lower depths but also of the upper world, at once incredibly beautiful and aesthetic but also anthropomorphised by humans as malevolently threatening. A complex animal agent in the construction of the human. A veritable polyp–phony.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Rebecca Bishop, Ph.D., is an anthropologist and cultural theorist. Her research interests lie in the field of philosophies of animality, gender and embodiment and hybrid identities. She currently lectures in the School of English and Media Studies, Massey University, New Zealand and is working on a book titled bare lives: the embodiment of animality. Matthew Candelaria received his doctorate from the University of Kansas in 2006. He is interested in biopoetics (evolutionary aesthetics), monsters, and science fiction, in addition to vermin. His most recent scholarly publications are Reading Science Fiction, co-edited with James Gunn and Marleen Barr, and “Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic: From The Descent of Man to ‘Empire of the Ants,’ ” in Enemies of Humanity: The Nineteenth-Century War on Terror, edited by Isaac Land. He currently works authoring web pages, blogs, and articles for a search engine optimization firm. J. J. Clark teaches at the University of Southern California where she is pursuing her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing. The critical element of her dissertation focuses on the personification and racialization of the horse in the literature of the West. She has completed a collection of short fiction, The Paragon of Animals, and has recently published a story with Review Americana. She is currently at work on her first novel, OmegaKondre, loosely based on her experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Suriname. Debra Durham, Ph.D., is an ethologist who specializes in primate psychology and behavior. She serves as the Primate Specialist for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and is also the Co-founder of the International Association for Animal Trauma and Recovery. She works to understand how primates and other animals respond to trauma and how human guardians and caregivers can support their recovery process. Ryan Hediger is visiting assistant professor of English at La Salle University in Philadelphia. His research focuses on the rhetorical function

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of literary and cultural objects in 20th-Century and contemporary America, with emphasis on animals, ethics, and environment. He has published on Hemingway and animals and is completing his book manuscript, Homesickness: Ethics, Animals, and Weak Subjectivity in Contemporary American Culture, showing how serious engagement with wild animal others can revise the function of genre, the work of writing, and ideas of ethics. David Lulka is a faculty member in the Liberal Studies department at California State University, San Marcos. His research seeks to reconfigure the relationship between humans and other species by exploring the manner in which material properties and philosophical principles align, potentially enabling the construction of mutually beneficial hybrid environments. His dissertation examined the factors leading to the growth and geographical diffusion of American Bison onto public, private, and tribal lands during the 20th century. His papers have been published in several journals including Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Sociologia Ruralis, Great Plains Research, Ethics, Place, and Environment, Geoforum, and Anthrozoös. His forthcoming paper examines the quandary posed by roadkill by utilizing the work of Samuel Beckett. Jed Mayer is an assistant professor of English at SUNY New Paltz. He is currently at work on Scientific Dominion: Experimenting with the Victorian Animal, which explores scientific, ecological, and political debates surrounding the nonhuman animal in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Articles on cultural responses to evolution and vivisection have been published in, or are forthcoming from, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Prose, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, and Victorian Poetry. Sarah E. McFarland is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern State University, where she specializes in American environmental literature, ecocritical theory (especially animal studies and ecofeminism) and gender studies. Sarah has written about representations of animals, wilderness, and gender privilege in American nonfiction nature writing; her current research deals with how representations of animals are used to construct human conceptions of animal subjectivity, gender, intimacy, and contemporary environmental ethics.

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Debra Merskin, Ph.D., is an associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. She is also a graduate student in Depth and Ecological Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute studying trans-species psychology. Her work in feminist critical/cultural studies involves the (mis)representation and (lack of) voice of marginalized humans and other animals, particularly as related to the role of mass media and discourse in maintaining hierarchical structures. Dipika Nath received a doctoral degree in women’s studies from the University of Washington in 2008. Having spent several years in LGBT and queer organizing in India, Dipika’s current research interests include the interimplication of discourses and practices of sexuality, gender, race, and animality, the politics and processes of knowledge formation and social control and violence, and the relation between a radical rethinking of animal subjectivity and an anti-capitalist politics of animal “terror-ism.” Rebecca Onion is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of American Studies. She is planning a dissertation that will explore the intersections of children’s cultures with science and technology. Stephanie Rowe is an assistant professor of humanities at EmbryRiddle Aeronautical University. Her doctoral work concentrated on the increasingly urgent question of “the animal” in the deconstructive project of Jacques Derrida and the similarly deconstructive treatment of this question in nineteenth-century literature. Informed by this earlier research, her more recent work has examined Frankenstein as animal rights text and animals as figures of abjection and haunting in Flaubert. She is currently at work on a study of flight as a figure of damnation in classical and early modern epic poetry. Shelly R. Scott, Ph.D., is an Academic Advisor at Indiana University in Bloomington. Her doctoral work at Northwestern University analyzed performances of animals at tourist and sporting sites. Her publications include “Been There, Done That: Paving the Way for The Vagina Monologues” in Modern Drama and “Conserving, Consuming, and Improving on Nature at Disney’s Animal Kingdom” in Theatre Topics.

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Laurence Simmons is an associate professor in Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has published in the fields of poststructuralist and psychoanalytical theory including three co-edited volumes on Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek. His most recent books are two edited collections: Speaking Truth to Power: Public Intellectuals Rethink New Zealand (Auckland University Press 2007) and with Philip Armstrong Knowing Animals (Brill 2007). Traci Warkentin’s interdisciplinary research interests in the ethical, educational, and cognitive dimensions of whale-human encounters in captive environments were largely inspired by her experiences working at the Vancouver Aquarium during her undergraduate studies. She has a B.Sc. in Honours Biology from UBC, an M.A. in Values and the Environment from Lancaster University, and has recently completed her Ph.D. in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Traci is currently teaching and advising in Environmental Studies at York University, where she is an adjunct faculty member. Select publications include “Dis/Integrating Animals: Ethical Dimensions of the Genetic Engineering of Animals for Human Consumption,” Special Issue: Genetic Technologies and Animals in AI & Society, and the entries “Philosophy and Animals” and “Animal Metaphors” in Marc Bekoff ’s Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships. Cat Yampell is completing her dissertation in the English department at Wayne State University. Her current research focuses on Young Adult texts involving human-animal to animal metamorphoses in which the animal is privileged. Cat’s publications include “When Science Blurs the Boundaries: The Commodification of the Animal in Young Adult Science Fiction” in the July 2008 special issue of Science Fiction Studies, “Social Responsibility Versus Artistic Freedom: The Construction (or Destruction) of Women in the Harry Potter Series” in Children’s Fantasy Fiction: Debates for the Twenty first Century, and “Judging A Book by Its Cover: Publishing Trends in Young Adult Literature” in The Lion and the Unicorn.

INDEX 1857 Rebellion, 274 Abbott, H. Porter, 45 Adams, Carol J., Pornography of Meat, 285–86, 287; The Sexual Politics of Meat, 285 Adrian Ivakhiv, 27 Affordances, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 38, 39, 42 African Americans, authenticity of, 159–60, 168, 175; subjugation of, 159, 169–73, 175, 177; association with horses, 164–66; derogatory stereotyping of, 158–59, 163–64, 166–67, 169–70, 175 Africanist presence, 160, 161 Agamben, Giorgio, 210–11 Agassiz, Alexander, 358–59 Agassiz, Louis, 135, 359 Alex the parrot, 1, 11, 339 Alexander Wilson, 36 Allan, Scotty, 143, 151 Allmendinger, Blake, 160 Althusser, Louis, 280n Animal autobiographies, 196–99 Animal ethics, 41 Animal Welfare Act, 234–35 Animality, 211, 216–18, 224–25, 253, 261, 267, 270, 276; discourse of 257–58, 259 Animated animals, 89–103 Anthropomorphism, 3, 45, 46, 50, 54, 61, 62, 64, 65, 72, 75, 87 Ape language experiments, 207–28; historical representation, 213–15 Apes, 260–61 Aphids, 350 Aristotle, 107, soul in 344, De anima, 345n, 347n Arluke, Arnold and Clinton R. Sanders, 62 Assemblage, 77–79, 81, 83, 85–87 Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research (AAMR), 193, 201–2 Atomic testing, 359–60 Augustine, 213

Autism, 322–24, 326 Autry, Gene, 158, 166 Bad Mojo, 316–20 Baker, Steve, 175 Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 202 Baldy the dog, 143, 151 Ballantyne, R. M., 359 Balto the dog, 129, 131–32, 142, 143, 154–55 Barthes, Roland, 361 Bartlett, Arthur, 141–42, 143 Bateson, Gregory, 49 Bear, see Grizzly bears Bekoff, Marc, 4, 7, 12, 51, 61 Bell, Charles, The Hand, its Mechanism and Vital Endowment, as Evincing Design, 121–23, 127 Bending, Lucy, The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late NineteenthCentury English Culture, 191n Benjamin, Walter, “Gloves”, 282 Bentham, Jeremy, 13, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 184–85 Berger, John, About Looking, 89 Bergson, Henri, 355 Bernard, Claude, 191, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 183, 193 Bert, Paul, 205 Bikini atoll, 359 Binti the gorilla, 6–7 Biology, foundations of, 345 Biosonar, 24, 25 Black Beauty, see Sewell, Anna Blaschka, Leopold and Rudolf, 363, 364, 366 Boerhaave, Hermann, 346 Bonnet, Charles, 343, 345, 346, 350 Bouissac, Paul, 49, 59 Bouse, Derek, Wildlife Films, 90, 93 Bowden, Charles, 98–99 Brand, Max, 158, 172–73 Bridges, John Henry, 187 Brookside Zoo (Cleveland), 132, 154

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Buck the dog, 140, 151 Burnette, Smiley, 166 Burrow, The, 77–79 Butler, Judith, 227 Byrd, Richard, 153 Calandrini, Jean-Louis, 351 Captive umwelt, 28, 29, 35 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 364, 365 Carlson, Marvin, 50, 51 Carnivism (Carnivist, Carnivistic), 280, 280n, 287, 294 Castle, The, 78 Cavell, Stanley, 73 Cellini, Benvenuto, 364 Chain of being, 350, 352n, 353 Chantek the orangutan, 220, 223 Character, 45, 46, 49, 51, 62, 65 Chinook the dog, 142–43, 153–54 Choice/choose, 47, 48, 49, 52, 55, 59 Cixous, Hélène, 367–68 Cleland, John, 193–94 Cleveland Museum of Natural History, 132 Clever Hans the horse, 62–63 Cnidaria, 343, 361 Cobbe, Frances Power, 192–93, 203–4 Cockroaches, 305–9, 312–20 Coetzee, J. M., 62 Cognitive dissonance, 229–30, 245 Colbert, Stephen, 157, 177–78 Colonial forest management, 264–65, 267–69 Commodification, 40 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot, 212, 215 Cooper, James Fenimore, 149 Coral atoll, 358, 359, 360, biodiversity of, 361 Coral, 358–61, destruction of, 360–61, formation of, 358, reproduction of, 356–57 Corporeality, 218–19, 221 Cosslett, Tess, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction 1786–1914, 195 Crabs, 345 Crayfish, 345 Crist, Eileen, 2, Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind, 184n Cronon, William, 101 Cultural transmission, 41, 42 Currier and Ives, 164

Cuvier, Georges, The Animal Kingdom, 109, 110, 120, 126 Cyborg, 284, 298 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 364, 365, 367 Darwin, Charles, 3, 215, Descent of Man, 186, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 197–98, human descent from animals and influence on animal experimentation, 186–87; 359, theory of coral atoll formation, 358, 360 David Abram, 30 Davis, David B., 162–63, 165–66 De Certeau, Michel, 47–48, 52 De Waal, Frans, 4, 11, 94 Death, 12, 20, 322–23, 334–39 Decartes, Rene, 5, 184, 185, 212 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 69, 76–78, 80–85, 87, 354, 355 Deleuzian, 87 Derrida, Jacques, 9–15, 65, 96, 118, 123–26, 302, 321–22, 334–36, 338 Descartes, René, 75–76, 86, 350 Desmond, Adrian, 228 Desmond, Jane C., 47, 49, 52 dian marino, 36 Diderot, Denis, 348–49 Diphtheria, 129–30 Disability, 20, 322–23, 330–31, 333–34, 336–37, 339 Diven, Robert Joseph, 147, 151 DNA, 355 Dobson, Michael, 51 Dodgson, Charles Luttwidge (Lewis Carroll), 189 Donkey, 164, 167, 173 Dorman, James, 175 Douglass, Frederick, 164 Doxa, 361 Echolocation, 24, 25 Ecological perception, 26, 29, 31, 35 Ecological psychologist, 26, 27 Ecological psychology, 29, 34 Edward Reed, 27, 29, 38, 39 Edwards, Richard “Britain is Sickliest”, 291 Embodied agency, 34, 36, 42 Emotions, 4 Environmentalism, 89, 98–103 Epigenesis, theory of, 347–48, 351n, 352

index Erskine, Thomas, 185 Euthanasia, see Killing Excretion, 303, 307, 318 Feral children, animal reared, 252, 261, 274; and “Race”, 256, 258; and animality, 259, 261, 265; native feral children, 261, 263 Fiddes, Nick, A Natural Symbol, 286, 294 Flanagan, Owen, 6 Food, 280, 284–95, 296 Foster, Michael, 186 Fouts, Roger, 219–20 Frank, Robert, 190 Free will, 5 Freud, Sigmund, 224, 364 Frost, Anthony & Ralph Yarrow, 58, 59 Fudge, Erica, Animal, 289 Furness, William, 217 Gallop, Gordon, 226 Galloping Danger, see Brand, Max Gates, Barbara T., Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World, 203 Gaude, Marnie, 70–71 Geison, Gerald, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology, 186 Genre, 20, 322–23, 326–29, 334, 336, 338 Germinal life, 355 Gompertz, Lewis, Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and Brutes, 185 Gorey, Edward, 369 Grandin, Temple, 20, 321–27, 329, 335–37, 339 Grandin, Temple, 57 Great Barrier Reef, 356 Gregory Bateson, 31 Grey, Zane, 158, 160–61, 171 Grizzly bears, 67–72, 74–77, 79–87 Grizzly Man, 67–73, 75–76, 81, 86 Grizzly Maze, 76, 79–80, 84, 87 Grizzly Sanctuary, 70 Haeckel, Ernst, 149, 362, 363 Hall, G. Stanley, 149 Hand, idea of, 107–27 Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory (Great Britain 1873), 190 Haraway, Donna, 121, 211, 223, 282–87, 298 Hardaway, Roger D., 160

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Harrison, Brian, Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain, 188n Harvey, David, 68 Haynes, Frank Jay, 164 Hearne, Vicki, 56 Heidegger, Martin, 12, 25, 123–24, 127 Henniker, Florence, 200 Heracles, 347 Herzog, Werner, 67–70, 72–76, 80–82, 85–87 Hidalgo, 158, 173, 177 Hoggan, George, 191–92 Homo lupus, 285, 295 Hoofbeats and Society: Studies of Human-Horse Interaction, see Lawrence, Elizabeth Atwood Horse: authenticity of, 158–59, 166–68, 176–77; subjugation of, 157, 159, 170, 174, 178–80; stereotyping of, 157–61, 166–67; nostalgia for, 168; symbolism of, 161; agency of, 159, 178–80; abuse of, 171; racialization of, 160–62, 164, 168; horseface minstrelsy, 159, 162, 166, 167, 170, 177; plug horse, 167; Uncle Horse, 159, 173, 175; police horse, 173–74; race horse, 179 Horse’s Tale, A, see Twain, Mark House, 303–4 Howard C. Hughes, 24, 25, 28 Hugo, Thomas, 197 Huguenard, Amie, 67, 74–75, 82 Human-animal, 279n Humanization of animals, 96–97, 102 Hybrid performance, 33 Hydra, freshwater, 344, 347 Hydra, Lernean, 347 Improvisation, 47, 51, 52, 58, 59, 60 Independence, 47, 48, 55, 56 Interspecies communication, 1, 6–8, 91–102 passim Intersubjectivity, 209 Itard, Jean Marc Gaspard, 216 Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy: Literature of Subversion, 279 Jakob von Uexkull, 23 James J. Gibson, 26, 29, 30 James, Will, 161 Jamie, Kathleen, 366 Jane Desmond, 37 Jellyfish, 361, 362, 363, 364, 366 Joe’s Apartment, 312–16

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John T. Sanders, 29, 30, 35 Johnson, Tim and Karey Kirkpatrick, Over the Hedge, 89–103 Johnstone, Keith, 58, 59 Kafka, Franz, 76–79, 81, 84–85 Kaflia Bay (Alaska), 76, 79 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, 352 Kanzi the bonobo, 209 Kasson, Gunnar, 131, 144 Kellogg, Winthrop Niles, 217–18 Kennedy, John Pendleton, 158, 165 Kete, Kathleen, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris, 204 Killing, 241–43 Kindchenschema, 94, 102 Kindl, Patrice, Owl in Love, 279–86, 288, 289–94, 296, 297–99 King, Margaret, 95 Kingsford, Anna, 203 Kipling, Rudyard, 261 Klause, Annette Curtis, Blood and Chocolate, 279–81, 283–88, 294–99 Knight Rider, 173 Koko the gorilla, 207–9, 220, 222–24, 228 Koko, 327, 339 Kroc, Ray, 292 La Mettrie, Julien Offray, 210, 215 Labor, 323, 332 Lacan, Jacques, 65 Lane, Martha A. L., 143, 145 Lange, Friedrich, 352 Language, 1–2, 9–15, 18–19, 98, 321, 324, 326–27, 337–39 Lansbury, Coral, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England, 191n Lawrence, Elizabeth Atwood, 161, 166, 174, 178 Lefebvre, Henri, 304, 318, 320 Leibniz, 350 Lewes, George Henry, 188 Lewis (Meriwether), and (William) Clark, 67, 74, 82, 136 Lindbergh, Charles, 130 Linnaeus, Carl, 253, 347 Lippit, Akira Mizuta, 61 London, Jack, 140, 144, 152 Lone Ranger, the, 158, 169

Loups-garoux, 285, 287 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 352n Lyell, Charles, 358 MacPhail, Euan, 6 Madagascar, 173 Magic Realism, 279 Marine World Africa, 37, 38 Marineland, Canada, 37, 38, 39, 41 Marsigli, Luigi Ferdinando, 358 Marvin, Garry, 47, 49 Materialism, 351, evolutionary, 352 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 30 Medusa (Gorgon), 363, 364, 365, 367, social function of, 366 Memmie Le Blanc, 252 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 207 Metacommunication, 31 Metamorphosis, The, 77 Mettrie, Julien Offray de la, Man a Machine, 351–52 Michael Noonan, 41, 42 Midgley, Mary, 43 Miller, George and Warren Coleman, Happy Feet, 89–103 Mimesis, 210–11 Minstrelsy: minstrel shows, 158–59, 163, 165–70, 174–76; coon songs, 163, 166, 169, 175; Tom shows, 169; Uncle Tom, 158–59, 169, 170; Zip Coon, 167, 169; Jim Crow, 166–67, 169 Mitman, Gregg, Reel Nature, 93–94 Modern, 69–76, 85–86 Modernism, 68, 72, 75, 80, 82 Modernist, 73, 87 Modernity, 68, 70, 75, 86, 259, 263 Monboddo, James Burnett, 214, 216 Mooney, Nan, 55–56 Morrison, Toni, 159–61, 174–75 Mortality, 13, 321, 333–34, 337–38 Mule, 164 Murray, Les, 366 Mutual affordances, 27 Nagel, Thomas, 8, 61, 226 Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind, 98 Nature/Culture Divide, 283–84, 289, 296, 297 Nelson, Barney, The Wild and the Domestic, 98 Nibert, David, Animal Rights, Human Rights, 282–83, 296, 297

index Nietzsche, Friedrich, 353, Daybreak, 353–54, psychology of, 354 Nim the chimpanzee, 221–22 Norris, Frank, 151 Nussbaum, Martha, 16 O’Barry, Richard, 50–51 Objectification, 39, 40 Octopus, 343 Ouida, Puck (1870), 196 Ovid, 363 Pacific Ocean, image of, 359 Pain, 235, 238, 240, 244–47 Parker, Chauncey G. III, The Visitor, 309–12 Parthenogenesis, 345 Patrick Moore, 25 Patterson, Francine, 208–9, 220–22 Peacock, Doug, and Andrea Peacock, 70 Pearson, Keith Ansell, 355 Pepperberg, Irene, 1, 11 Pepys, Samuel, 210 Peter Harries-Jones, 31 Petrification, 363 Peyssonel, Jean-André, 358 Phenomenological biology, 23, 29, 31, 34 Phenomenology, 30, 34 Philanthropos, Physiological Cruelty; or, Fact vs. Fancy. An Inquiry into the Vivisection Question, 200, 201 Philo, Chris and Chris Wilbert, Animal Spaces, Beastly Places, 111–12, 117 Physiological Society (Great Britain), 200 Plantation culture, 164–65; nostalgia for, 159, 163, 168 Plantation romance, 158–59, 170, 176; fusion with western, 163; masculinity in, 170–73 Plath, Sylvia, 368 Play behavior, 7–8 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, see Morrison, Toni Plumwood, Val, 98–99 Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, 107–27 Pollock, Mary Sanders, 195 Polyp, 343, 349, 368, digestion of, 344, motion of, 344, tentacles, 344, autogenesis, 345, reproduction, 346, 350, turned inside out, 346, absence of aging in, 347

381

Postmodern, 71–72 Praz, Mario, 367 Preformation, theory of, 347 Premodern, 68, 71–73, 75 Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Bill (Great Britain, 1809), 185 Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time, 369–70 Proximity, 68–71, 80 Racial anxieties, 159, 163–66, 168–70, 172, 174 Rapoport, Amos, 303–4 Rats, 309–12 Realism, 73, 81–82 Réaumur, René-Antoine Ferchault de, 345 Reciprocity of perception, 30, 40 Report to an Academy, 77, 84 Resistance, 29, 36, 42 Ritvo, Harriet, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, 188n Rogers, Will, 166 Roughing It, see Twain, Mark Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 212, 214 Rowdy the dog, 147, 151 Rowe, Katherine, Dead Hands, Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern, 120 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), 185, 188 Rutherford, William, 186 Ryle, Gilbert, 5 Sacks, Oliver, 326–27 Sanderson, John Burdon, 190 Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue, 209, 220–23 Schechner, Richard, 48, 50, 59 Schiff, Moritz, 203–4 Schultz, Alfred, 209 Sea World, 32, 34, 36, 37, 40, 42 Seeley, Eva Brunell, 143, 145 Seppala, Leonhard, 142 Sewell, Anna, 161–62, 196–97 Sexuality, 307–9, 314, 316 Shamu, 40 Shapeshifters, 281, 281n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 367 Shit, 312–15 Shrek, 173 Sign language, 115 Simondon, Gilbert, 355n Singer, Peter, 227, 284–85

382

index

Sitting Bull, 176 Snyder, Gary, The Practice of the Wild, 99 Social affordances, 38, 39 Sociozoologic scale, 301 Speciesism, 230 Spolin, Viola, 58 Spunk the dog, 142, 143 Stables, Gordon, Sable and White (1894), 196 Stem cells, 351 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 158, 165, 169–72 Stuck, Hudson, 140 Sullivan, Jeremiah, 45, 64 Susan Davis, 37 Swallow Barn, see John Pendleton Kennedy Swift, Jonathan, 255 Tatiana the Siberian tiger, 1 Taylor, Paul W., 2 Terrace, Herbert, 220–22 Theory of Evolution, 3, 189–90 Theory of Mind, 11 Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 Tigers, 271, 272, 275 Todorov, Tzvetan, 108–9, 114, 126 Togo the dog, 142 Tonto, 169 Topsell, Edward, 214 Torgovnick, Marianna, 70–71, 85 Treadwell, Timothy, 67, 69–72, 74–77, 79–80, 82–87 Trembley, Abraham, 343–46, portrait, 347, 348, Mémoires, 349, 370 Trial, The, 78 Trimmer, Sarah, Fabulous Histories (1786), 195 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 162–63 Turner, James, Reckoning With the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind Twain, Mark, 158, 160, 167–68 Tyson, Edward, 214 Umwelt, 24, 25, 26, 28, 35, 42 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Stowe, Harriet Beecher Ursus arctos horribilis, 74–75 Val Plumwood, 39, 40 Valley of Wild Horses, see Grey, Zane Van Leeuenhock, Antonie, 343 Vegetarianism, 101

Vermin, 301–20 Victor of Averyron, 216 Victor of Aveyron, 254–55 Victoria Street Society, 197 Virginian, The, see Wister, Owen Virtual, 81 Voltaire, 350 Von Haller, Albrecht, 352 Voyeurism, 37, 39, 40 Walden, Arthur, 142, 153 Washoe the chimpanzee, 219–20 Weakness, 13–14, 321, 333–34, 336–38 Weismann, August, 355 Weiss, Daniel Evans, The Roaches Have no King, 305–9 Wells, H. G., The War of the Worlds, 368–69, The Island of Dr Moreau, 369 Were-animals, 280, 281n, 281–99 Werewolf (-ves), 281, 285–88, 294–98 Western frontier, 159, 162–63; nostalgia for, 162–63, 168; mythology of, 159, 161–62, 165, 176 Western, popular, 158, 160, 162, 165, 168, 170; authenticity in, 176; masculinity in, 157–59, 168, 171–73; wild west shows, 162, 165–67, 176 White, Paul H., 191n Whitley, David, The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation, 93, 95 Wild man, 211–12 Wild Peter, 254–55 Wilderness, 98–100 Wilks, Samuel, 186, 194, 199 Williams, David, 49, 50, 51, 56, 62–63 Williams, Raymond, 280n Williams, Slim, 144 Wilson, E. O., 14 Wilson, Frank, The Hand, How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, 115–16, 123 Wilstein, Steve, 46, 53, 60 Wister, Owen, 158, 166, 170, 171 Witmer, Lightner, 216 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 225–26 Wolf boys, 257, 263, 266, 273, 277 Wolf/human relationship, 296–97, 298 Wolfe, Cary, 50, 51, 65 Wolves, 264 Yerkes, Robert M., 219 Zebra, 173 Zoomorphism, 72, 80